LPWTF? -|- Canadian record cover art, uncovered

Ketamines: All the Colours of Your Heart | Eleven Eleven | So Hot | Stay Awake [2013/14] — Paul Lawton seems to be living out a daydream he might’ve had as a teenager. He’s been playing in bands for two decades, he runs a rad record label called Mammoth Cave Recording Co., and he’s become known for chucking well-spoken rocks at the machine that makes popular music. (When Lawton’s not moonlighting, his day gig is crafting words for a Toronto-based environmental firm, and he taught media and digital culture at the University of Lethbridge before moving east.) Lawton’s latest recording project with his longtime band Ketamines — a collectors’ series of four 7” releases whose standalone covers form one larger, truly magnificent collage image — is evidence that he’s also diving even deeper into his own past. “As a kid, I was really obsessed with Wacky Packages,” explains Lawton. “If you never had Wacky Packages, you’d collect certain cards and put them together on the floor and make a bigger picture. And I was kinda OCD about it as a kid, and I would just hustle any way I could to try to raise money to buy more Wacky Packages, because otherwise I would have an incomplete picture. But at that point there were no card shops, no Internet, so you had to just keep buying packs in order to complete the collage. So this is an idea that I’ve wanted to do for years.” Lawton had considered producing a “cassingles club” a few years ago with another band called Myelin Sheaths, in which a run of cassette releases would assemble into one crazy-ass puzzled-together image created by his go-to cover artist (more on that creative partnership a little later). But while this four-part Ketamines release (for the sake of brevity: 4x7”) had been stewing on Lawton’s back burner for some time, it also turned into an opportunity to find new and similarly childhood-bound collaborators.

Ketamines drummer Jesse Locke immediately suggested Felix Morel when Lawton asked him about artists to consider for the 4x7” project. “I’ve been a fan of Felix’s stuff for years,” says Locke. “Felix did a cassette for this label Los Discos Enfantasmes — like, gatefold sleeve, 70s prog-rock-style art, with wizards and magic. And his own band, Panopticon Eyelids, has always had crazy art work as well — just B-movie, horror, sci-fi, kinda schlocky, with a million different images combined. I thought it’d be a perfect fit for the band and for the series, especially because it was a collect-em-all kind of thing.”

They let Morel run with the concept with only the unheard Ketamines recordings in hand. “We gave him complete carte blanche,” says Locke. “We just sent him the songs, and he was like ‘Okay, just give me a bit of time, I’ll need to listen to these and dream something up.’ When he gets an idea he works really fast, but his conceptual stage is kind of what takes a while. So it took about a month, but then he latched on to these 80s Halloween costume catalogues for the art. It’s all bizarre fake versions of Batman, Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, Elvira — but it’s like off-market Elvira and Batman. As you can see, there’s a father and son Batman in one of the sleeves. It’s this weird Halloween-80s-sci-fi-horror kinda concept.”

Morel collected and loved Wacky Packages (and other stuff like Garbage Pail Kids cards) as a kid too. He also liked the idea of adding to the Ketamines’ cryptic collage aesthetic with the 4x7” project, and he “liked the songs and thought I could do them justice.” So he tapped into his pop-cultural memory bank as well. “I visualized a fake promo campaign based on the collectible movie cards from my childhood, the ones that came with a big slab of pink bubblegum,” explains Morel. “I remember in the 80s collecting the E.T. cards and trading in the schoolyard to complete the black-and-white puzzle that was on the back of the cards. So I made up a movie in my mind called ‘Chaos Planet Rebel Forces,’ which is visually inspired by the movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars. The movie is an amazing mix-and-match of actual Star Wars scenes mixed with the budget Turkish version — total budget-pop-art-collage style. I had just found this amazing costume catalog with really cool photos and it was the perfect opportunity to use them in a collage. Space ninjas and UFOs versus amphibian aliens battleships! Collect all four!”

Morel also borrowed from other Ketamines records by incorporating black-and-white wavy swirls. While it’s unlike any other Ketamines cover, Morel’s 4x7” collage manages to hit a similar note composed by both darkness and lightness, an intermingling of sinister and playful forces. He attributes this to the collage being inspired by Turkish Star Wars and other exploitation science fiction flicks. “They always have very basic, very defined good and bad characters” says Morel. “At one point I had a set of little kid witches but I lost the evil one so I couldn’t have the good-evil balance I had with all the other characters. So I filed the good witch away and forgot about that idea.” Morel admits that his contribution doesn’t have anything to do with the lyrics or the band. “I usually choose the imagery based on a gut feeling I get listening to the music and for some reason the Ketamines inspired that collage.” The idea grabbed him by the belly after he discovered a seemingly picked-over costume catalogue on top of a trash can in Montréal’s Mile End district on his walk home one day.

The serendipitous find became Morel’s catalyst for building a single composition made of four separate ones. “I did the whole thing on scale, 14 inches by 14 inches. I knew from the start I had to find a big central image around which I would collage different scenes from this fake mental movie in the four corners. That way I could ‘easily’ divide them in four in the middle to have the 7” covers. I didn’t know what the central image would be until I found this costume catalog in the trash. Inside I found these huge 13-inches-high pictures of women dressed as medieval princesses and I just had to add gold jewelery, half-alien faces and weapons on top of them to make them look like outer space princesses. I easily found all the rival warriors and magicians and contrasting colours, all in the same catalog. I tell you, this find really pushed the project forward big time! The fact that there was the basic B-movie sci-fi theme of good and evil planets and civilizations made the process of dividing the collage in four parts easier.” Beyond his obviously fabulous imagination, it was Morel’s “zero digital” process — meticulously hand-cutting and -assembling his collages with scissors, glue and tape — that had heavy appeal for both Lawton and Locke. “He sent it to us fully completed and we thought it was amazing,” says Locke. “Between Tumblr and the cassette world there are a lot of people doing the collage thing nowadays and mashing a bunch of different elements together. But Felix does it in such a good way.” [Scroll down for a short Q&A about Morel’s creative process.]

As if developing a four-way cover art project wasn’t tricky enough, another important aspect of the series is that it’s being distributed through flourishing outposts of the country’s garage rock community. Four Canadian labels are releasing individual Ketamines’ 4x7” records: Toronto’s Pleasence Records, Saskatoon’s Leaning Trees Records, Mississauga, Ontario’s Hosehead Records and Vancouver’s Mint Records. Locke says the project was largely driven by Lawton’s massive passion for limited-edition releases made for collectors — “or for grippers, is the terminology that we like to use.” Had Lawton also been holding carte blanche, the 4x7” set might be much tougher to grip. “My original idea got vetoed by James, who I write songs with,” explains Lawton. “I wanted the first one to be 500 copies, the second one would be 400, the third would be 300 and the last one would be 100. So it’d be almost impossible to complete the whole thing. James is really big on having the music be available to everyone — he doesn’t buy into the same collector neurosis that I do.” For those of you that do share Lawton’s neurosis, the last 7” in the series, Stay Awake, drops on February 18, 2014. Three hundred copies of each 7” were pressed.

Lawton remembers a younger version of himself hunting for records almost solely on the strength and strangeness of their covers, specifically at a store called Records on Wheels in Winnipeg in the 90s. And while the Ketamines 4x7” series certainly taps into that particular nostalgia, Lawton’s actually aiming to hit an even deeper nerve. “Everybody’s whole day is in front of a computer now,” says Lawton. “And you see images all day long, to the point where I think we’ve become desensitized to images as a beautiful thing. And then when you get one of these things and you hold it in your hand, there’s something to the evocative power of an object that takes over.”

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Ketamines: You Can’t Serve Two Masters [September 2013] — Paul Lawton first started getting Carlos Ruiz to create cover art for his records about five years ago, during an unexpected shift in his already prolific stretch as a music-maker. “I was in all these other bands that were touring, and Myelin Sheaths was kind of my fun side project with these two girls who really were just learning to play instruments, and I was just learning how to play drums, and we had this other guy who was kind of just starting too,” explains Lawton. “I was in quote-unquote ‘good bands,’ and then I had this band that was kind of on the side where we would just make really shitty demos and put them out on the Internet, on MySpace. We got picked up by HoZac, a label out of Chicago, one of the biggest American garage labels going right now. That was in 2010, and it kind of spring-boarded us into record labels wanting to all of a sudden put out our records. I started playing in bands in 1995, so 15 years of touring and playing and everything before anybody took us seriously.” Ruiz (aka C.m.) was really into the Myelin Sheaths’ HoZac 7”, Do the Mental Twist, and he and Lawton connected through mutual friends in Vancouver’s garage-punk scene. Evidently Ruiz knew he was really going to like the band’s follow-up record too. “He just gave us the cover for our second single, which was out on a German garage label called Bachelor,” says Lawton. “It was called Stackticon, which was named after a promotional Burger King-Transformers tie-in. It was this idea of a burger as a transformer that we wrote a song about. I think that single is the best thing that band did.”

Ruiz remembers hanging out with Myelin Sheaths at the Smmr Bmmr festival and just really enjoying their company. Lawton really liked Ruiz’s process — using photocopied distortion rather than Photoshopping, cutting and pasting everything by hand. The materials that went into the first cover Ruiz made for Lawton [above] give a nice snapshot of his style. “The girl in the center is from a picture of all these teens at a indoor pool in the 50s and to her right was a young boy laughing, so that’s why she looks so happy — I imagine he told her a joke or is flirting with her or something,” says Ruiz. “The bottom half is of a lake covered in lily pads printed on green paper instead of white, and the top is just Xerox noise. I hand-cut the lettering and the back is right out of my sketchbook, of the girl who is my model of all my Fungi Girl pieces — when she was like 17 or something. I don’t really remember what Paul and I working together that first time was like, but I imagine it was good for us to work together so much since.” The result was most definitely good for Lawton. “I absolutely loved that,” he says. “To this day, I think it’s the standard I hold that guy to.”

Ruiz’s disquieting female figures became a signature on Lawton’s records in 2010 (and they’ve anchored the Ketamines brand ever since). He made the cover for a release with another of Lawton’s music projects, the Radians’ Iran 7” [above], in early summer. Then another trippy lady became the emblem on the Myelin Sheaths’ full-length record, Get On Your Nerves, released that October. “It’s a woman who he photocopied to obscurity and then drew weird squiggles all over her,” explains Lawton. “In the first version she was just standing tall on the thing and he didn’t like that, so he clipped the bottom half and then repeated it on the top, to kind of give the illusion of it coming down like a filmstrip. We used that image for T-shirts and everything. Everything we’ve done with Carlos kind of begets itself to other merch things because they’re distinctive and unique, and simple enough to transfer.”

Ruiz says the cover of the Myelin Sheaths full-length is probably still his favourite collaboration with Lawton. “I was in Copenhagen and wandering around alone thinking that I needed to get this cover done for Paul,” recalls Ruiz. “So I was going down weird little streets until I found this place with the crappiest Xerox machines and the guy only spoke German and I made the basis for this cover there. For some reason the Xerox machine kept printing track lines all over the images. For reference on how crappy the Xerox machine was, I also made this...”

Myelin Sheaths disbanded about a month after Get On Your Nerves dropped. Lawton says the split “was really disappointing,” but that it allowed him an opportunity to shift gears. “I’d been doing Ketamines with James Leroy since the late 90s, we had changed the name from James Leroy around 2010,” he recalls. “We were just making records in our garage and James has a lot of health issues so we didn’t ever really push it, but every year we’d make a new record and just never give it to anybody, so we had this stockpile from the last 13 years that was just sitting there. After I saw the writing on the wall that Myelin Sheaths was done, I really started pushing this Ketamines project.”

Lawton enlisted Ruiz to make two covers [above — the official release, plus another version for a limited release] for the Ketamines’ HoZac 7”, which came out in September 2011. The image’s lightness with a dark side — evil eyes without pupils, but surrounded by colours and bubbles — also began to reveal how deeply their sensibilities overlapped. “For a long time, we would describe Ketamines as bubble-gum-psych-pop, and I think Carlos’ artistic vision is very psychedelic but still poppy, too,” explains Lawton. “Even the way that he free-hands everything, there’s a levity to his design — if you’re working with a designer who’s doing everything in Photoshop, for example, I find there’s a sterility to it a lot of the time. There are no errors; everything is perfect. Nothing in Carlos’ work is symmetrical, nothing is even. And it’s kind of haphazard, but in a really beautiful way. It looks like a human being did this, and you can tell something about that person. “There have been debates in the band whether we should start moving away from Carlos, and I’ve always resisted it because everything he gives me, my reactions are always the same. At first I’m like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know about this,’ and then I’ll look at it more and I get more and more excited about it. And when I get them in the mail — I remember getting the Spaced Out LP in the mail, and having really hated it on the computer, but seeing it in that 12-inch vinyl format, it just comes to life in this really unique way.”

Lawton has learned to stay out of the way after he asks Ruiz to create something. “I’ve looked at his portfolio in the past and told him something I really like that he did. But then he kind of spaces out and does whatever he’s going to do anyway.” That said, Lawton finds Ruiz really easy to work with and appreciates the mystery of his process — “I feel like the more I tried to direct him, the worse it would be.” There’s also an inherent trust and appreciation that comes from having mutual friends and momentum, as well as working with and admiring a similar subculture of musicians. “I like it because I’m not just trying to work with someone who doesn’t really care about me or my band, and is just taking it on as a job — Carlos really gets the music and what we’re doing,” says Lawton. “Our trajectories have also been very similar. We both have been doing stuff for a long time and then things started to catch on at roughly the same time.” Through the small deluge of Ketamines record art, show posters and other merch items that Ruiz has adorned over the last few years, originality has remained a priority. When Ruiz set about developing cover art for the band’s 2013 LP, You Can’t Serve Two Masters, his main aim was to make sure it didn’t look like anything else he’d done for the band.

“I don’t think I actively tried to reflect too deep of a meaning into it, though I was listening to the songs as I often do to get the right vibe,” says Ruiz. “All I think I was really trying is to do was a face on a record cover, but have it be unrecognizable. That and maybe trying to show that it wasn’t recognizable even if she was looking in the mirror because she was so effed on drugs. Basically a drugged-out cutie.” In retrospect, Ruiz’s favourite thing about this latest Ketamines cover girl comes from the textural detail surrounding her. “I like that even though I don’t really know how to use computers, I successfully scanned it well enough that it looks like scraps of paper hanging on the cover,” says Ruiz. Lawton sees a stronger link with the spirit of these particular songs, both in the paper scraps and the drug-out cutie’s mug. “There’s a duality to it, which is in a way kind of sinister,” he says. “But the way that it’s all cut up and thrown about, it’s just like, there’s nothing serious about it. He definitely has that sense of playfulness. And especially in the way it says You Can’t Serve Two Masters, it’s just him free-handing with a sharpie. There’s no attention to font, it’s not overly designed, it’s just like, ‘I’m gonna cut this shit up and stick it back together and that’s what it is.’ I think it works with the title and the theme of the record, which is kind of the about the impossibility of living competing lives.”

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Qs & As with C.m. Ruiz

LPWTF  Where does your artistic vision or style come from? CmR  “If you looked at some of my early work, I was drawing all of my posters. And a lot of them were based on illustration I saw what worked on gigposters, then it turned my illustrations into more of a 60s psychedelia sort of vibe. Then one day Brian Standeford asked if I would be interested in him doing an image and me doing the lettering for a poster since I was getting more into that element of posters. He taught me how to use the different settings for Xerox machines and what kind of output you could produce with subtle tricks. And then I started getting into Xerox-only design. I found a lot of inspiration in those old rock posters but also old punk fliers and tried to mix it with modern print design that I thought looked cool and worked well. I was doing two to five free posters a week when I was 18, 19 and 20, so I had a lot of practice.”

LPWTF  Why no Photoshop? What do you enjoy about how you work? CmR  “I don’t have a computer and doing it by hand seems like more of a science to me. It’s tangible and I can make it do whatever I want rather than Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen Edges or something. It’s just easier to wrap my head around and at this point it’s becoming a dying art that I’m glad to still be actively doing.”

LPWTF  Given your affinity for imperfection, what feels as close to perfect as you get in your work? CmR  “I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten anything perfect before. With my art though there are tons of instances where I really love the accidental scuzz marks and dirty fuzziness left by the Xerox machines or sharpie bleed-through. I have personal favorites but I do a lot of art for a lot of different clients, so there may be too many realms for me to choose just one.”

LPWTF  Where and how do you like to hunt for collage materials? CmR  “I can’t really find what I use in thrift stores, but sometimes antique shops will have cool old girly mags. A really reliable source is flea markets. When people just bring tons of old crap they want to get rid of, you can find some real gems in the piles of publications. One of the shops I go to in Seattle whenever I have some money is this place in Pioneer Square. You have to go under a guitar shop and then you get to this antique store with really low ceilings — and they have a lot of old Seattle memorabilia. But in this tiny back room they have a bunch of nudist magazines and WWII-era girly magazines. The room is separated by gay and straight magazines but there are a lot more hard cocks on the walls. It’s a pretty cool shop.”

LPWTF  Where do you go to create? CmR  “Unfortunately I have to go to Kinkos sometimes because there are a few by my house, but in the last four years they’ve gotten super expensive and their machines are all digital so I try to avoid it. I used to go to this place called CK Graphics since they were .04 cents a copy and they had machines from the late 80’s and early 90’s — that was the perfect look. But they closed after the owner retired in January 2013, so now I like to go to a place called Rams Copy, which has those same machines for .06 cents a copy and it has computers so I can scan stuff and email it to people when it’s done. In a healthy sitting I will usually go there for about four hours and in that time do something like two posters, a record cover and often I’m working on some sort of other project like an illustration that I can finish alongside those other things.”

LPWTF  What’s on your cutting room floor? CmR  “There’s always stuff that I do when I’m trying to warm up that just ends up in the rubbish bin. It’s always kinda crappy. If there is something but it’s not quite right, but the image is really great, I will kinda just bank it for awhile and some time in the future come back to it and see if now I know how to use it properly. That’s why even though I get rid of those drafts, I don’t toss out my magazines.”

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Qs & As with Felix Morel

LPWTF  Where does your artistic vision or style come from? FM  “I don’t know if I have a ‘vision’ for my art but I know my aesthetic comes from my childhood, stuff I took for granted at the time but now realize are pretty cool and entrenched in me — pop culture stuff like airbrush art, early computer art, toy packaging, B-movie and science-fiction art and tropes, new age and visionary art. I mix these influences with more highbrow art and concepts such as pop art, surrealism and dada, punk and metal imagery, trance states, optical illusions.”

LPWTF  Why no Photoshop? What do you enjoy about how you work? FM  “Well, I am not very good at the computer and Photoshop in particular, so I find it very funny when people tell me I make very good Photoshop collages. I actually take it as a compliment— mission accomplished! I like to keep it old-school: paper, scissors, glue, some paint and sharpie pen when I need to hide something. Bringing a computer in the collage process kinds of defeat the handmade optical illusions I want to achieve. It becomes too easy and loses some of its power. That’s why it can take me a while before I am done on a piece, because there is no random shit and no computer cheating.”

LPWTF  Given your affinity for imperfection, what feels as close to perfect as you get in your work? FM  “My Bataille Solaire self-titled cassette cover [above] is 95 per cent perfect. It feels almost perfect because I was able to do it just the way I had envisioned it in my head. I wanted to do a really simple collage using only stock images but have it look like a new age occult paperback. The poison glass skull bottle on a mirror comes from a collectors’ encyclopedia book I have, I think, but pretty much the whole thing comes from 90s stock image catalogs. I wish I had put the right side aura face with red lighting bolt a bit more centered, but at the same time it’s the obvious move to do for me, placing the elements symmetrically for easy composition. So yeah, I am really proud of that Bataille Solaire collage — it’s really small too, like 2” by 5”. I am also very proud of Blood From The Tiger’s Womb, the collage I made for Bataille Solaire’s second tape, Documentaires [below]. That said, I usually work on a collage until I find it perfect so I could probably name a bunch I feel are perfect. I don’t do many collages either, so I don’t have a pile of mediocre ones I don’t show to people.”

LPWTF  Where and how do you like to hunt for collage materials? FM  “I do a weekly round of various pawn shops and charity stores for useful books and magazines. I also have a pretty big archive of books, magazines, photocopies of patterns and colored paper to chose from, all indexed by subject for easy finding. I also pick up anything useful in the trash and recycling bins when I can. I did an insert for The Unireverse LP around a Vachon Christmas Log Cake packaging I found in the middle of the street.”

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All images by Felix Morel & C.M. Ruiz. Story by Eric Rumble. Track down Ketamines records via Bandcamp.

Purity Ring: Shrines [July/2012] — Crafting images to complement the stirring mystical ecosystem of Megan James' lyrics and voice and the heart-jacking, spine-jangling textures of Corin Roddick's soundscapes can't be easy. And Kristina Baumgartner admits to sketching out a lot of different ideas for the cover of Purity Ring's much anticipated full-length debut before she had the right one. But once it took shape, the rest of the Shrines packaging illustrations flowed from there.

Baumgartner didn't have a lot of cash to spend on art supplies when she was creating the drawings, so she worked with what she had. “I drew everything with pencil crayons and wax pastels on large sheets of brown construction paper, which I cut into 12-inch squares.”

Improvisation seems to be one of Baumgartner's habits; just this month she released her first zine, called House Plant, which she painted and self-produced. She describes it as “10 little paintings [like the one below] all done in ink that represent my home life this winter. I spent most of the season alone in this big apartment with my cat, and I got sucked into my own little world. The paintings are about that.” Baumgartner is selling House Plant in some Montreal shops and online (or you could pick one up at Purity Ring's merch table on their North American tour in April and May 2013 — for which she also designed a new poster and tote bag).

LPWTF: I read about how the illustration with the coffin was entirely based on "Crawlersout." Can you tell me about the specific lyrics or ideas that inspired the Shrines album cover image. Also, how did sheep originate as an appropriate symbol for the band and its music?

KB: For the Lofticries 7-inch [see below], I had cut out dozens of photographs to collage together for the cover. Corin really liked some of the sheep ones I had. I was interested in Catholic imagery at the time and so I came up with this image of a girl watching over her flock of sheep. To me, sheep represent a kind of innocence and purity and so I thought it was an appropriate symbol for the band.

When we were coming up with ideas the Shrines cover, I originally wanted it to be a photograph of a girl laying with her sheep in some kind of sacrificial setting. However, Megan and Corin really wanted me to draw the cover. So it's essentially the same idea only simpler. The lungs overhead come from a line from "Fineshrine.”

[Get a little closer, let fold / Cut open my sternum, and pull / My little ribs around you / The lungs of me be crowns over you]

Why are hands and fire also good symbols to represent the songs on Shrines?

A lot is based off some of the meanings of Megan's lyrics. And since she doesn't reveal what they mean, neither will I.

Without going to deep into it, Megan often writes about people's spirits and about some type of motherly figure looking out for her. The ghost hands and then the human hands that surround the girl under the coffin are meant to represent those two forces.

All of the images seem to be set in some sort of dreamscape or non-physical space, which I think gels nicely with the record's lyrics and textures. Was this what you intended?

When I listen to Megan's words, they all seem to be set in some non-physical space and I wanted the artwork to reflect that. The girl is a guardian of sheep and a dead loved one, and she lives in her own world.

Who is the girl?

No one specifically.

Where are the original illustrations now?

One illustration is framed in my living room, one I gave to Megan. The front and back cover are somewhere in the shed.

What do you like about these images?

It feels weird for me to say what I like about the images when I made them. The only thing I can think to say is that I like how homely they are. And by that I mean that I like that they look so handmade. You can see all the pencil marks and texture on the LP. You can't tell after it was all printed, but I coloured in all the black background and it took hours and hours. It left smudges, because I used a black wax pencil — well, I really went through like six of them — but we didn't edit them out. I like the mistakes.

Hook & Eye: North St. EP [Feb/2013] — Sometimes, impulsiveness is the best medicine. Sometimes even for record covers. 

My hyper-brilliant friend Marc Rimmer — whose work I profiled to get this blog off the ground almost two years ago, here — recently looped me in on the fabulously uncluttered guidance that led to his latest piece of kick-ass record packaging. Musician Jeff Macleod had enlisted Rimmer (an old buddy from the Calgary music scene) to design the cover art for his new band’s forthcoming EP.

Given that these two guys now live about 4,000 kms apart, this is how they settled on the image you see above, via text message:

Jeff: “I need an album cover. Got any sad, dark, lonely photos kickin’ around?”

Marc: “Not really, but here’s a photo I snapped at a farm on the weekend.” [At left, below.]

J: “Nice! It has the right mood, but needs something. Can you try superimposing a fire on it?”

M: “Sure, here you go.” [Middle.]

J: “Shit yeah! Well, while we’re on topic, if you make it an old Ford truck that’s on fire, I'll give you free hand jobs and pizza for life.”

M: “Done.”

Rimmer wrapped up the image by adding some glow coming off the truck and onto the surrounding grass. The original photo was taken on Rimmer's iPhone during a foggy farmland excursion to Huberdeau, Quebec (about an hour and a half northwest of Montreal), and he suggested it because of its “isolated, ominous, super-surreal” qualities. (The fire came from one of his old camping photos, and he fixed up and recoloured a stock photo of the truck.)

Macleod describes North St.’s songs as “lo-fi, moody, indie” — which sounds exactly as they should, considering they were recorded by another lo-fi, moody, indie Calgarian, Clinton St. John. (Those two played alongside the indomitable Matt Flegel in The Cape May a few years ago.) The EP will be self-released on Fir Trade Records in early 2013, and Hook & Eye will support it with some shows in Calgary and probably a small western Canadian tour in the spring.

Although the dosage of forethought that went into the cover art creation is perfect, I asked Macleod to elaborate a little on the choice, albeit not too seriously: 

Why did a sad, dark and lonely image need to be on the cover of this record? “It suits the mood of the music — especially ‘North St.’ and ‘Late Night Karate Practice’.”

Can you describe what you like about the cover image? “I think it has a pretty starkness/somber beauty to it.”

What have you got against Ford trucks? “Haha. Nothing. I was having sushi with a friend, and he saw an old one in his neighborhood earlier that day. It just popped into his head when we were deciding what to burn while texting with Marc.”

Can you tell me about the most enjoyable fire you were ever involved in building? “My friends and I still have illegal fires down in a secret spot on the city reservoir all the time. We just bring wood, Roman candles and beer.”

How is your music similar to an abandoned patch of land? “Hmmm... not sure. Maybe listen to 'North St.' on our bandcamp. It’s an instrumental. Very minimalist.”

And for good measure, I asked Marc to send me a handful of other photos that he took on his road trip to rural Quebec. Enjoy: 

The Famines: The Complete Collected Singles, 2008 – 2011 [Nov/2011] — RAYMOND BIESINGER SAYS The Famines are collectors and archivists by nature. Biesinger — who writes, sings/wails and plays/thrashes guitar alongside Garrett Kruger’s flabbergasting drums — is the graphic architect of the five-year-old band’s no-frills, data-stratified aesthetic, not to mention a successful illustrator, designer and print media artist. So when he started working on cover art for this assemblage of 7-inch singles (many of them sold out), he began by simply rearranging the old record labels, cutting and pasting and mocking them up in search of a shape. 

“When doing 7-inches in the past, when it came to coming up with concepts, we always wanted to make sure that the cover reflected the actual content of the A-side, instead of just being a generalist catch-all image of the band, or an attempt to depict the band conceptually even,” explains Biesinger. “With a big LP like that, it would seem funny to illustrate only the first song because there are a lot of songs, and eventually it just made sense to try to use both the front and back cover to try to show what these things were before they became the collected 7-inches.”

Biesinger had tried a few things out, and then landed on the winning formation when he was half-asleep or something. “It really reminds me of a revolver, with the chambers that bullets go in,” he says. “I think it’s a very strong shape. What is that, a hexagon? Once I mocked it up I thought it looked wonderful, but then there was a small problem: We didn’t have 14 songs, we had 11 songs.” [One of those jams, “P. L. C. A.,” was recorded for a compilation called Bloodstains Across Alberta, and there are two new bangers as well, “Hi Hi Hi” and “Faux Famous,” all of which Biesinger whipped up labels for.]

This table-of-contents utility, with most of the circles indicating A-sides and B-sides in chronological order, is just the sort of match that Biesinger loves to strike. “The contents are described perfectly by the cover and rear cover, so it’s completely informative, but it’s also aesthetically pleasing. I think that’s what [The Famines] like to do: to have purpose behind everything we do. And to me there’s complete purpose to what’s on that record cover.” 

Perhaps there’s one marginal exception: the logos at the top right of the B-sides cover. Biesinger has made these little icons over the years to use in Famines merch and packaging, often as a layout device to “fill up space, finish off a thought.” He makes them with different levels of intent, sometimes “in a way that represents what we do, in other ways not at all. They’re just really convenient to have around. It’s funny, I would make posters sometimes and I would post them on gigposters.com and people would comment on what a shame the logos were.” Given that they depict things like can-can girls wearing balaclavas, Biesinger admits that “I think sometimes we fuck with people a little because there’s so much purpose in everything we do, and then you throw in something like that. What does that even mean?’ I try to avoid the subject because I don’t know.”

Here’s a hint at why Biesinger would rather deke: “When I see art that’s about nothing or art that people can’t back up, that people can’t say why it was made in an intelligent way that isn’t, like, crazy art-speak, I get angry. I really feel like there’s enough meaningless fluff, there’s enough amusing, funny things out there, that it’s our job to make stuff that actually has purpose and argument behind it.” 

The resulting aesthetic is certainly purposeful, if not downright shrewd. “It’s getting harder and harder economically to be a band, and to tour,” he explains. “If you make everything in black-and-white, it’s gonna be a hell of a lot cheaper. It always blows my mind when venues have full colour posters, 11 x 17. When we started, that’d be 80 cents each — you do [B&W] and it’s 10 cents each. I would rather have that 70 cents in my gas tank than doing as much as one of these [posters] could for our show.”

Buoyed by practicality, The Famines became documentarians early on (both in terms of the subject matter they tore into and their promo materials), which gelled nicely with stark, codified B&W. “I think that now the aesthetic is just so established in my mind that sometimes it takes over and makes me make things that look Famines-ish, but which don’t necessarily have much of a subject behind them,” says Biesinger. “I’m less strict these days. If I think something’s fun, I’ll just do it, as long as it’s small. But I would never do that with a 7-inch cover or record cover just for fun. I think the world has enough of that, I don’t need to do it.”

The process of coming up with designs to represent the band’s charged, provocative songs found a natural groove early on as well. “I know all the themes, I know the songs intimately, I know everything that I thought about while making them, so the subject material I always know well,” says Biesinger. “In the months leading up to a record, I’ll usually roll through a lot of ideas, and then when I think I’ve found the right one, I’ll bounce it off of Garrett and he’ll tell me if it’s bullshit or not. He’s a really good editor, quite honestly.”

Biesinger also says The Famines mostly came to be because Kruger pushed him over the line between talking about jamming and actually making a racket. “I’m not gonna say he forced me to do it, but if it was not for his originally enthusiasm, I would not be in bands anymore.” Kruger’s old band, The Wolfnote, and Biesinger’s, The Vertical Struts, had broken up, and they kept running into each other at the Black Dog in Edmonton, and eventually it just happened. (Biesinger moved to Montreal in August 2010.) He says their personalities are very different, but that they’re “growing together, which is kinda cool. Garrett’s pulled me out of my shell so much since 2008, I owe him a lot.” 

Whoever was most responsible for hatching The Famines, the band certainly seems to provide Biesinger with an essential creative outlet. And clearly — at least judging by his appreciation for small type — there’s a lot of ideas to share. “I’ve always been fascinated by context; I have a degree in history, and I want to know what is behind everything,” he explains. “The internet gives a lot of people an opportunity to get more information about things they don’t understand. So I think when I’m making physical things, I try and squeeze in as much context as possible, and that results in a lot of small type in a lot of places.” 

He admits that the attraction is economical for sure, but seems a bit surprised. “I never even thought of in that way—that I have a thing for small type. I think I have a tolerance for it, and I tend to not think about people with bad eyesight, maybe. Which is very cruel.”

The Famines: Syllables [May/2010] — Biesinger recognizes the font treatment on this particular 7-inch as particularly cruel, but “pretty necessary for what it is.” He wrote the A-side song as a rough parallel of George Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language. “After trying to think of ways to express that visually, I just decided to put the full text of the essay on the 7-inch. So that required a lot of squeezing, and I went back into my distant memories of laying out newspapers for The Gateway, and brought out some pull quotes. You would probably need a magnifying glass to read it properly.” (Damn skippy: that thing’s more than 5,250 words!)

Why did Biesinger want to write a song about the essay? “Because the band has always been about having purpose in our songs. Every single one of them is an argument. Not, ‘Yeah, you guys sound angry!’ But everything is carefully measured. There’s evidence, there’s a strong question that is about something. Orwell’s essay is all about how vagueness is kind of an agent of tyranny, and how if someone speaks in concrete specifics and actual facts instead of trying to obfuscate things, they’re doing well, and how we need to take steps to become more concrete in how we express ourselves in our everyday lives. I think that’s incredibly important.” 

Biesinger feels this concept is as resonant now as it was in 1946, when Orwell’s essay was published. “I think people are generally afraid of the consequences of having opinions about a lot of things. And perhaps even people who have formal arts training, because they know how to make things, but they don’t necessarily have that deep of a knowledge in other things. I think, if you go to art school, it’s very rare that you spend a lot of time reading about history or politics or economics or greater society. And so perhaps those people don’t feel comfortable going out on a limb and making statements about society that are very strong. Me, I’m just full of it.” 

He cites modern music journalism as a great example of concept-dodging. “I don’t know who’s worse: the band or the interviewer,” says Biesinger, ripping on cliches like the obligatory live sound versus studio sound discussion, and the fact that you end up talking about “anything but the actual meaning behind the songs. I feel like lyrics should have greater scrutiny and singers should be asked about them far more often. But I think that makes a lot of singers uncomfortable to have to actually defend what they’re saying in some way. I feel like the biggest cop-out in the world is to say, ‘It’s up to everyone to interpret this in the way that they choose.’ To me that feels irresponsible.”

How to Book a Maybe Successful Tour for a Band That Hasn’t received Hype on Pitchfork, etc. [Dec/2010] — You might not expect it from an irreverent, eardrum-drubbing band hatched in Edmonton, but one of their most popular merch items is rooted in sharing a practical perspective. Biesinger says there was a time when the How to Book… pamphlet was outselling all The Famines’ 7-inches, albeit at $1 a pop. “I remember one Christmas, I thought we weren’t a band anymore, we’re just a pamphlet,” he laughs.

Quite the opposite, actually. The pamphlet came out of the band’s unique experience. “I’ve booked five cross-Canadian tours now,” explains Biesinger. “And I have no illusions about our band — we’re not the next thing, we’re not that great, we’re not the next next next thing either. We’re a low-buzz band. Everything we’ve built, we’ve built because of a lot of hard work and not because some magazines decided that people should see us. I think that puts us in a situation which is really different from a lot of touring bands.”

Biesinger wrote a first draft of what later became the pamphlet because a friend from a band based in Kingston, Ontario, called False Face — “a band that was kind of in the same place as us, but hadn’t toured much at all” — asked him for advice about how to do it. So during a long stretch in the tour van, Biesinger cranked out a long, meticulous and blatantly honest email. “It was basically explaining how we tour, how it would be applicable to them. And I sent it to him, he really liked it, and a couple of months later I was thinking about this email I’d saved that was full of good advice. I’d also ended up sending it to other bands that we’d played with that had the same questions.”

Eventually he decided to edit it properly, add a few sections and make it fit into a layout — “and that the type was appropriately small,” he jokes. When I bring up the writing style, Biesinger calls it “pessimistic optimism” and “really frank.” Take the first line, for example: Certain regions, like Western Canada, destroy friendships and eat new bands alive. “And it’s a fact — I’ve seen it,” says Biesinger. “It’s not booster-ish. It’s super honest. This is what you need to do if you want to make this happen, and good luck—it’s hard.”

You’ll notice that the maps Biesinger used to illustrate the pamphlet have arrows suggesting movement. His original plan, “to add to the kind of fatalism, was to have each of the maps be of a different failure in war,” but he “managed to fail at doing that, although there still some failures in there—the Tet Offensive and some others.” Biesinger says he’s kind of amazed at how many people from different parts of the country that play different kinds of music have been interested in it. “There’s a section at the end that I’m exceptionally happy with that’s all about the economics of being a C-level, D-level, E-level touring band these days, and how things have changed in the last 50 years.” 

This is a subject area Biesinger knows intimately. One of his many fabulously nerdy design and illustration projects beyond The Famines has been an (ongoing) infographic that tracks the history of the Edmonton music scene back into to the 1950s. To produce that piece of work (26-feet and growing by the year), he spoke with a lot of musicians, and ultimately came to understand that there are “far far far fewer bands these days that are making a living wage touring than there used to be.” He also learned that for the larger, entertainment-hunting public, live music is no longer such an easy draw. 

“There used to be regional acts that could perform, say, all over Alberta even, and play every night of the week, maybe doing moderately challenging Beatles-esque stuff, or Who-ish stuff. They could make a living doing that in the 60s. Then there’s a change in demographics, there’s more competition in terms of entertainment, the internet fragments people’s ideas of what they want to see. It makes it easy for you or me to be really excited about what’s going on in Japan now, but it’s really rare that someone uses the internet to look for new things locally. I think people who pay attention to the local scene are exceptional.” 

(But I digress... or Biesinger did, I’m not sure who to blame. In any case, he says he’s “really excited about the pamphlet format these days.” He’s also made one from a talk that he does about the future of commercial art, called Doom.) 

Oddly enough, in spite of Biesinger’s observations about the state of live music, The Famines have carved out a respectable following across the country. After two years of playing together they had put on 125 shows, and “that felt like a lot, so we decided to celebrate it,” says Biesinger. So, naturally, he created a big, silkscreened, B&W map that catalogued all of those shows. 

He chose the odd map shape because “I was just in the mood for something incredibly geometric,” and he says it’s loosely based on the Canada’s 125th celebrations that went down in 1992. “I knew that for the regions we did not play in, we could de-emphasize them. So, sorry about everyone who lives in the Arctic, and everyone who lives near Lake Superior. I stripped Canada down to its absolute minimum, and kept what was needed to express the information.”

Drawing from a master list of all the Famines shows (Biesinger does the booking), the map lists every city, venue and date they played in chronological order. “I’m a trained historian, making records is what I do,” quips Biesinger. Originally he’d tried to include the names of all the bands they’d played with as well, “but that would have maybe quadrupled the amount of text, and any way I tried to lay that out it just didn’t look good.” 

Cutting back is perhaps the most essential move in Biesinger’s repertoire — if not anyone’s. “We live in very fortunate place and a very fortunate time, when you and me can take advantage of incredibly cheap technology to do almost anything that we would want aesthetically, or in a publishing sense,” he says. “The options open to us are absolutely enormous, and I think in that setting, one of the most interesting things you can do is accept limitations and work within them, or impose limitations on yourself. So my goal for the last 10 years, aesthetically, has been all about trying to push as little as possible as far as possible. That’s why I’ve been in two-piece bands since 1999. That’s why I don’t use pedals when I play. The band is trying to make the most out of guitar, drums and singing. And in illustration, I’ve just started working with four colours, and to me that’s the frontier. But still, doing something in black and white and very simple is super exciting.”

The Famines: Free Love [July/2009] — So obviously Biesinger is pretty serious about what he makes. And to the fictional condom machine brands and ads he created (with help) for The Famines’ second 7-inch release, he says, “That’s about as funny as we get.” 

He’s ain’t kidding, either. The Centipede, The Hook, and The Black Mamba seem as though they’d be particularly ill-fitting. I’d suspect The Freedom Tickler might offer an uncomfortably aggressive level of protection. Puss Shock would demand a pretty special lady. [Fun fact: the head was a made using a photo of Biesinger’s cat, Cleo.] Some of the labels are inside jokes, such as The Lobster Tail, courtesy of a friend of Kruger’s who claims his dick has a lobster tail on its end. (Nobody verified this, BTW.) 

While the collection certainly draws on residual ideas from tour stops in small bar bathrooms over the years, there’s also a method to this particular madness. “The A-side is called ‘Free Love As A Sales Technique,’” explains Biesinger. “At the time, I was watching a little bit of Sex in the City with my wife, and I was noticing how it seemed like adultery was kind of becoming okay in culture. It was something that was kind of being given sanction by mass media — a legitimate thing that you could do and the world wasn’t going to end. I thought that was a very bad thing. So the track, I guess you could kind of look at it as: Sex sells, isn’t that kind of gross, and don’t we have better things to do?” 

At one point Biesinger’s plan was to drive around Alberta and take photos of a bunch of condom vending machines as source material. “But then I realized, ‘Oh shit, this thing needs to be at the plant, like, next week.’ And also, how unsatifisying would that be to drive around Alberta and find out that these things are actually only in two different places or something? So I ended up going with the internet for the general ones, but I’d say about two thirds or these are completely invented. Garrett and the label and I just made a giant list of the most ridiculous condoms you could imagine, and then I took the ones that I could illustrate quickly and made them.” 

The Famines: 14 July 2008 [April/2009] — At the time, a quick-and-dirty project was probably necessary after the elaborate Famines’ release that Biesinger had produced over the previous year or so. In early 2008, he’d opened up a book publishing house called the Belgravian Press. “I had a big Xerox machine, a book-binding machine, a stack cutter — I had everything you needed to make books,” he says. Having such toys had a curious effect: “There’s a saying that goes something like, ‘When you have a hammer, you think every problem is a nail.’ Well, when you have a book publishing house, you think every problem is a book.”

That summer — on July 15, precisely — The Famines had played their inaugural show, which kicked off their first Western Canadian tour and the release of their first recording, 2x7. Edmonton’s arts weekly, Vue, wanted to document a warm-up performance, so they’d arranged for Biesinger and Kruger to give their set a stomp-through on the day before, July 14. “It was the first time we’d played live — there were maybe three or four people there — and it was perhaps indicative of how Famines shows are,” recalls Biesinger. “It was crazy, we gave it our all. We were scheduled to play eight songs, but after the seventh, I broke the neck off my guitar. It was hilarious. It was the first time I’d done that. And we’re just playing for the arts weekly, in our studio, and there are six people there.”

The Vue crew produced some material from the recording, which Biesinger says “sounds really ragged, but there’s a spirit behind it that’s really nice.” The quality was too low to press an LP with it, but they wanted to do something, and settled on a cassette release. “We thought it was best not seen as a studio recording, it was better as a document of a time and place. So we established that, and then I thought, ‘Well, how do you make sure people understand that?’ I realized we’d probably need a lot of liner notes, because I wasn’t going to be satisfied with just a little J-card. So I starting thinking about how you could package it as a book.”

One of Biesinger’s priorities while producing books was to pay special attention to their size and shape. “Using Canada Post’s shipping standards, we intentionally made stuff that would be cheap to ship,” he says. A book stacked on top of a tape would mean hefty shipping fees, but they would fit through the mail slot if they were packaged side-by-side. So the next step was to figure out how many pages a book would need to be cassette-sized. The answer turned out to be 268. 

“So then the problem became: How do you fill a book that small with information, and what the fuck do you include? And the answer is: everything,” explains Biesinger. “We wanted it not to be bullshit. We wanted it to be totally factual. We wanted to involve as many people as possible, and I got off on the idea of it being like a primary source. A future historian could look at this, and it isn’t about The Famines It’s about people in 2008 who were making music — where they came from, what resources they had, all kinds of details about them.”

The result is basically a meticulous record of The Famines getting off the ground. The front section details how the book was made and the context it was made in, including a chart about the band’s economics — “How much money we made and lost in the first year leading up to having our first show.” There are maps of the band’s jam space and the studio where the book was bound and created. Biesinger, Kruger and the Vue folks all filled out questionnaires that asked for all sorts of detail: height, weight, educational and employment history, marital status, gender, eye colour, net worth (“Which is hilarious”), hospital visits in the last 12 months, co-habitants, past residences, and so on. Each person was also asked to itemize the tools they used to produce the recording, to describe that day and what happened to them immediately afterwards. 

“It’s a full account of July 14, 2008, for everyone who participated,” says Biesinger. When he explained it to everyone, he also insisted on honesty. “We wanted it to be true, we didn’t want any jokes. We wanted this to be as if you were reporting it to the police.” Indeed: Everyone also supplied their fingerprints. If there was something they didn’t feel comfortable discussing, Biesinger asked them to make up something plausible.  

Apparently Kruger was preoccupied during production, and didn’t even see the finished product until it was printed. He was also the last to submit his questionairre, which Biesinger says was well worth the wait. “His information is awesome. His description of his morning before the recording, it’s like: I was riding on my exercise bike and I was listening to Ozzy Osborne’s Blizzard of Oz, and when Snowblind came on, I paused for a moment...” 

Kruger’s level of honesty actually became a point of contention. “Garett’s parents were upset with him for being really specific about certain things, because we did a run of 300 and then another 50, and in the other 50 we removed some information about him.” Those 350 were “incredibly easy to sell” once Biesinger began putting the cassette on The Famines’ merch table. “There would be people who were at our show who just wandered in, and they’d be total weirdos, and I’d show it to them and they’d be like, ‘I don’t care who your band is, I want this.’ People were very enthused.” 

This sort of reaction was hard-earned, considering the intense labour and incomprehensibly skinny profit margins. Kruger dubbed all of the tapes on their label’s dubbing machine, and the book was hand-cut, hand-scored and hand-glued. “Because we were on a tight deadline again, I had four assistants in the studio working full-time for a week making them,” says Biesinger. “It took a ridiculous amount of time. And they ended up costing us about $9 to make, and we sold them for $10, which is the dumbest thing in the world. But we ended up breaking even, or I think we lost $40 on it.”  

As well as not losing too much money or too many marbles, Biesinger was surprised that the release charted pretty well on campus radio. “I’ve always been down on the recording, but other people found ways to really like the recording. So that makes me feel good.”

(Another digression, for the sake of cassette collectors: July 14 2008 is being repressed by Ottawa-based label Bruised Tongue, and will be released on October 17. Says Biesinger: “While we would've liked to have the book reprinted as well, it would've been impossible. So, the book is included as a download.”) 

(Ok, just one more brief digression: Another problem that Biesinger tried to solve by making it a book was the implosion of a band from Vancouver called the Molestics. “Remember the swing craze in the late 90s and early 2000s? They were kind of dirty, absurdist, retarded swing. They did really well in Edmonton for a long time, and the lead singer, Mike Soret, a total drunk, he wrote his memoirs, and I published them. And I thought it was magnificent. I’m sure some people have read Gord Downie’s or David Bidini’s books, and I think that when you’re hearing about the Canadian music experience, you always hear the success stories. But the thing about the Molestics is that they were a self-described C-level band that did kind a well — they could sell 100 tickets anywhere in Canada on a good night, they toured Canada a lot, and the West Coast of the States. But then they failed horribly. And that’s how 99 per cent of my friends’ bands end, and so the story was really relatable. It’s about a musician who’s at a level above where I’ve been, but his experience I recognize, and it’s honest. The band fails, breaks up, he tries to kill himself — it’s all in the book. And I think that’s a story that hasn’t been told, and I think it’s important to tell.”) [The book is called Confessions of a Local Celebrity: A Tale of Rags to No Rags by Mike Soret.]  

The Famines: 2x7 [July/2008] — Biesinger’s work compels because of his tremendous enthusiasm for gritty details, infographic-grade density and blunt, charming delivery. These talents, and nimble self-promotion, have taken him far. To reference just one solid example: when I interviewed him earlier this year, he gave me a copy of Spin magazine, in which his work regularly appears above Patton Oswalt’s back-page rant.

Given that his Famines work is even more deeply layered by the music it complements, there’s an enigmatic quality to the messages that emerge. As you’d expect from a self-proclaimed archivist, Biesinger’s also done a great job of assembling breadcrumbs that explore how that aesthetic has materialized. And as you’d expect from an astute businessman, he’s also released four editions (so far) of A Visual History of the Famines. 

The 50-page book, which Biesinger admits “isn’t organized very chronologically,” collects Famines concert posters, design ideas and mock-ups of things that didn’t end up in production. The first edition contained posters from the first Famines show, some early art concepts, vinyl label mock-ups (with visual treats like Serge Gainsbourg’s name on what is now-obviously a Famines 7-inch) and a bunch of different variations on the 2x7 cover. Some of those early experiments also speak directly to the band’s dynamic, juxtaposing facial fragments of Hollywood bad ass Charles Bronson and Canadian broadcaster and humanitarian diplomat Stephen Lewis.

“Early on in The Famines, we decided we were never going to do band photographs because we do not like the idea of there being a connection between personal appearance or beauty and artistic validity,” explains Biesinger, “so we adopted surrogates.” Bronson represents a forceful and severe nature, and Lewis brings rationality and argument to the table. If you’ve read this far, you’ll know who’s supposed to be who. 

It’s probably safe to assume that part of what keeps the band going is the tension between those two iconic opposites, and for Biesinger, the challenge that this tension provides. “Writing songs is hard,” he says. “My excuse to not write more songs is to make this stuff.” 

All art by Raymond Biesinger. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy The Complete Collected Singles, 2008 – 2011 and other releases from The Famines’ bandcamp page and Mammoth Cave Recording, or buy other rad stuff created by Biesinger at his Etsy page.  

ALSO: The Famines will be on tour in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes from October 17 to 28, 2012. Biesinger is designing T-shirts — “A collection of our favourite things, all through the federalist lens,” as you can see below — that you may wanna snag from their merch table (it'll be getting chilly by then). 

Grimes: Visions [Jan/2012] — CLAIRE BOUCHER SAYS she wanted the cover of her 3rd full-length Grimes recording to be “something very beautiful, and also very assaulting and violent, like the music.” She wanted the image to be zoomable — “like a Bosch painting” — and very movement-oriented. More than anything else, though, both the songs and their packaging had to be absolutely sincere. 

Boucher can certainly be candid about what she was going for musically. “I wanted to make something that reads like a symphony,” she explains. “It arches — it begins in a sort of meek but inspired way, becomes very powerful, and then becomes very sad and lonely. I want people to enjoy themselves when they listen to it, but in the end feel very distant.”

And the drawing she made for the cover definitely mines one of her main creative veins: an affinity for Mesoamerican style. “When I went to Mexico, I was actually really inspired by a lot of Aztec art. I went to the museum of anthropology and Teotihuacan. It was all so horrifying and elaborate. More similar to my own art than a lot of stuff I've seen, even just structurally, because they use lots of little images of screaming faces and strange patterns to make big elaborate pieces.” 

At the same time, Boucher says that “generally when I draw there is no concept, it's just free form, I always improvise in whatever way feels best and that's what I get.” Which sounds sort of like how she makes music too, having described a locked-in-her-bedroom recording process for Visions that involved tinkering and experimenting her way into the depths of sleep and natural-light depravation, self-isolating through the foggy and euphoric layers of her own songs.

Boucher says she usually draws during movie marathons, and that the Visions cover image was hatched with India ink, watercolour paper and “Ghost in the Shell II night, so I was thinking a lot about death and shit,” she says. “I do visual art in the same manner as music in that it's intensive, but it's not private at all. The album cover image took about 16 hours, I did it over two days. But it's weird because I was sitting in my friend's living room the whole time, so it was a much more social experience and there was a lot of feedback from my friends, and it was a bit different in that regard. At this point there is way less pressure for me to make visual art, so I only really do it out of love, whereas music has deadlines and pressures and stuff, so it's not as free anymore. It used to be the opposite.”

This is probably why the prevailing influence on the Visions pieces is very personal — “my symbols,” Boucher calls them: the penetrating eyes (or lack thereof), the writhing textures, a weeping alien, the slanted hearts, flush roses and cushy bows, which apparently she's been drawing since high school. “The eyeball was my first symbol and I use it in lots of ways all the time, but I also really like faces without eyes — which is why I'm attracted to skulls a lot. The alien head is my newest symbol. I have a tattoo of it now on my hand. It's crying cuz, I dunno, I was sad at the time.”

Whatever mindset sparked the details, Boucher's visuals are spiked with the same playful streak as her songwriting. The horizontal line of script atop Grimes on the cover says “I love” in Russian, and the two vertical lines are written in a conjured foreign tongue. “I've always been into fake writing on my art, particularly things that look kind of Japanese, because I love manga and anime poster art a lot,” she says. 

Jasper Baydala, who helped Boucher produce the packaging layout, added a few more hints of mischief. The pink block on the right side is actually the word Grimes “jokingly” copied and pasted over and over and over again — “We both thought that it looked good so we left it,” explains Baydala. (He also alludes, also jokingly, to the roots of that particular idea, apparently inspired by sharing a living space with Arbutus Records' honcho Sebastian Cowan: “I hear the word 'Grimes' hundreds of times per day.”) 

Just as he did while producing the layouts for all of the Arbutus' 2011 releases, Baydala hid a very small Ninja Turtle on the Visions packaging. And then there's the giant pink alien head. Boucher had wanted to base her design on “another album cover that she liked, and we arranged the elements of her album cover to roughly match it.” For one of her departure points from aping this unnamed record (Baydala's lips are sealed), Boucher suggested an alien head. A large-filter Google search quickly brought up the original alien head image, created by a then-anonymous artist, “who turned out to be a middle-aged man in Mississauga named Mark Khair, who makes alien heads in his spare time,” explains Baydala. “He was excited that we used it. It is a good alien head. I especially like that when we inflated it to put it on the back of the record, it became pixelated — that is the modern version of grain.”

Baydala says his favourite part of the Visions artwork is the fact that Khair's alien head is so big on the back of the vinyl. “That is fantastic. It is hard to get away with something like that, and in the future Claire will not be able to get away with anything like that.” No matter how Boucher's aesthetic ends up being affected by her popularity, Baydala puts her DIY sensibility nicely into context when he mentions the green bevelled lines he added to the packaging design. “I like the bevel because it is just like Photoshop. Maybe Grimes is distinctly Garageband.”

That said, Boucher's Visions illustrations also show her visual art arsenal shifting to much the same trajectory as her music — embracing more risk, trusting her instincts, filling out the space of her canvases with idiosyncratic tangents. When she painted the piece that became the cover of 2009's excellent Geidi Primes record, Boucher was just getting warmed up. “That was the first painting I ever really made, and one of my first 'eyeball' pieces, so it was sort of a revelatory experience,” she says. “Like, 'Oh shit, art is way better if you use something besides a mechanical pencil!' Plus, I realized that drawing on big paper is way more enjoyable and less tedious, and it looks better in real life.”

Even as her implements and materials evolve, thankfully it sounds like Boucher can't help but maintain a mind-gripping art practice: “I remember not doing a lot of other important things in favour of doing that painting.” 

IN LOVE AND life and (evidently) self-imposed free labour, there will always be the ones that got away. So in lieu of a half-assed year-end content rehash, here are 10 record covers that grabbed me by the eyeballs in 2011, but not with so much force that I just had to stalk their makers for the scoop on how, why, where, when, by whom and with-what-in-mind they were created. 

Please don't hesitate to send me potty-mouthed notes about any great Canadian cover art that I've overlooked, or simply to share why you think LPWTF is the cat's pyjamas. I hope you enjoyed this year's stories — keep your eyes peeled for a bigger, better, broader tales in 2012. 

The Rural Alberta Advantage: Departing [Mar/2011] — Embedded in an uncertain journey, we lean into the blown-out-of-proportion void. Hopeful and harrowing, desolate and rich, light and dark. This is the most gorgeous place I don't wanna be.

The Burning Hell: Flux Capacitor [May/2011] — Teasing out the motivations behind madness like this is the reason I started LPWTF. I can't tell if Santa is being inhaled or hurled.

Dirty Beaches: Badlands [Mar/2011] — I did sneak in one very short e-mail exchange with Alex Zhang Hungtai about the cover of his eerie, smoldering, simple-yet-irresistibly stylish full-length record. But then it exploded, and he got preoccupied with the likes of GQ. 

The image was captured in his friend Mike Lau’s basement in NYC, and intended to ape old-school mug shots with “something that was iconic and minimal, impressionist even.” Hungtai also says the ghostly atmosphere “plays into the blues mythologies Badlands was based on,” and that the image was essentially made the same way he made the music for the LP, by cramming compelling ideas together. 

“I wanted people to have that cover burned into their minds when they saw it. Even though it does not have any titles or names on the cover, I wanted the image to be a standalone symbol that summarized the gist of the material: Spirits, possession, the devil, exorcism, exile, lingering ghosts from a lost time you can't pinpoint.”

Hooded Fang: Tosta Mista [Jul/2011] — Imagine an every-luchadore-for-him-or-herself throwdown between these masked marauders. Now, imagine it as the main event at a Hooded Fang show. Has the band considered this? Could they, please? Would they need to concoct full costumes to match the masks, or have those already been made? How do you fit space for an amazing moustache onto the front of your luchadore mask? The questions and fantasies I could tap from this record might actually be impossible to exhaust. 

Timber Timbre: Creep On Creepin' On [Apr/2011] — An indelible film noir pilgrimage of a record cover, appropriately from the band I'd want playing dark folk fables around the campfire while I worked up the nerve to go see what the hell that building is. 

Sandro Perri: Impossible Spaces [Oct/2011] — Between making sand angels or climbing those chocolate mountains, I'm not sure what I want to do more. Either way, I totally need to stop peeking through the grass and wander around in this cover art.

Feist: Metals [Oct/2011] — As if the scenery wasn't lovely and enchanting enough, you can't help but grin with tickled envy when you realize she's secretly laid out on the giant F's middle branch, soaking up that epic landscape. Better still, she dropped the first hint of all this with a paint-by-numbers gimmick. What happens if Leslie Feist lets too much awesome out of the bag too early in her career? 

Evangelista: In Animal Tongue [Sep/2011] — Another enigmatic and beautiful otherworld on the cover of a Constellation Records release. Man, do I want a hit of whatever she's smoking.

Bry Webb: Provider [Nov/2011] — Primordial, murky, deceptively simple, oozing with raw textures and curves, bloody with metallic fissures, and imbued with the twinned illusion of soft and hard. Just like Webb's songs about gripping into manhood.

Dog Day: Deformer [Aug/2011] — IT ALL STARTS with an honest (and clever) moniker for the third full-length record by this wonderfully, melodically loud and righteously Halifamous band. Previously a fuller, cleaner four-piece, partners Seth Smith and Nancy Urich decamped from Halifax after something of a slow-mo implosion (making the band only marginally Haligonian, actually) and decided to reinvent themselves as a duo while learning to live off the land nearby. What existed before, in life and in noisemaking, was becoming deformed, rather than forming. 

“I always try to push our band to do something a little different, not having a cookie cutter sound,” explains Smith. “Doing the two-piece thing was basically the result of our band almost breaking up, having the other two guys kind of leaving, ending up with just the two of us, and doing something else using the same name. I already had a bunch of Dog Day songs, so we just decided to keep the name and go with it.”

DOG DAY - Make The Right Decision from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

A penchant for symmetry in the band's visual aesthetic also stuck. Urich and Smith wanted something classic for cover art, a high-contrast piece with little colour that could easily be screen printable. “I really wanted one face,” says Smith, “but I didn't want it to be our faces or someone that really existed, so we made someone up.” 

Using a still image of Liv Ullmann's actress character in Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film Persona as source material, Smith followed the same creative impulses that he's thrived on as an inventive, DIY graphic artist for more than a decade. “The actress has a real pretty face, and I've always been interested in making pretty things look ugly,” he says. “When I first started doing any kind of art it was with photocopies at Kinkos. I'd just take photos of Marilyn Monroe and photocopy them and then take that copy and scan it and copy it again, so there'd be these generations of decay and distress. I'm all about trying to see what the true image is in there after you take away all the make up and break it down.” 

Smith also attributes the overall packaging style to an aesthetic that he was gorging on while finishing the album—film noir, silhouettes, creepy animals, and black-and-white psychedelia. These influences hail from another project that he was working on at the time, a short film (more on that in a moment). But the act of deforming from a city lifestyle certainly enhanced this broader affinity for spookiness. 

“Thematically, the record is largely about me and my wife Nancy moving to the country and kind of living an introvert life out there.” This idea shows up obliquely in Deformer lyrics (from the song “Part Girl,” for example: The danger of trying new things / is a small price for fresh feelings), and more directly via the haunted landscapes and creatures found in the packaging art. “We spend a lot of time with our chickens in our backyard, so they made the cut,” says Smith of a hen's head that pops from one particular image. 

The couple's dog Woofy also makes a couple of appearances, sporting a deformed snout in one (above; Urich's face gets a similar deforming treatment in another image as well). The other Woofy influence is only in spirit, via another film still that Smith doctored in homage to their dog's crazy dream behaviour. 

“I have this film book that I got a lot of these pictures from, and that's from Rin Tin Tin,” says Smith. “It's one of the characters and the dog is just howling beside his dead master or something, and I thought it'd be cool if it was this dog ghost rising from the body. But also, the first song [on Deformer, called “Daydream”] has an intro recording of a dog dream that Nancy had done. Our dog Woofy always has these really loud, physical dreams, almost like he's talking, and he runs sometimes, so she was recording it and capturing it. We were almost going to call the record dog dream, and I wanted to do something visually that would complement that.”

The movie Smith was filming—currently titled Lowlife—“definitely rubbed off on this record” thematically. “It had a lot of similar elements,” he says. “There are a lot of weird, slimy creatures, a lot of dripping. And in the film there's a human character who deforms over time, he gets sicker and sicker, and I had to make these prosthetic deformations as makeup.” 

Tight-lipped about specifics, Smith divulges that the movie was shot on a very small budget around Halifax and on his and Urich's land in the country. When I ask about his attraction to black-and-white psychedelia, Smith says “that's what really interests me right now. The movie is actually a drug movie. With your traditional drug movie, when a character is under the influence or whatever, you just see so many crazy different colours and it's oversaturated, but it's kind of neat to explore that in a black-and-white environment. It can even be trippier in some ways.”

As you'd suspect, music will also play a big part in setting the cinematic atmosphere. Smith says he's using a lot of ambient stuff, but with a few left-field choices, such as a monastery monk's choir and another song from black metal pioneer Varg Vikirnes (aka Burzum). Most of the soundtrack is being developed in collaboration with Halifax's Divorce Records, drawing heavily from their roster of noise bands for an unconventional take on a mystery movie score. “It will be weird, if nothing else,” says Smith. 

The goal is to wrap up audio and editing this winter and then submit Lowlife to some fall 2012 festivals, maybe do a small gallery tour with a few of the cast members or something. “It's just an indie film, so we're happy if we can get 10 or 15 people to watch it in one place.”

Rome - DOG DAY from Seth Smith on Vimeo.

Smith has been developing motion pictures for close to a decade, including the Dog Day jam shown above. He was able to make this newer, much more elaborate film shoot happen because his friend (and Trailer Park Boys director) Mike Clattenburg lent him a professional camera and told him to do it. He borrowed some other gear and pulled together a skeletal crew of people, keeping everything easy and small. 

This is an approach that has served Smith well. He got started as a visual artist by making posters for his band in the late '90s, “before the Internet was really huge and you really had to poster to get people to know about a show.” He'd play around with photocopying, cutting and gluing images, spending small amounts of money over long stretches of time in the company of copy shop clerks. 

Sometime after Y2K he ended up living with a guy named Paul Hammond, who was doing similar work. They began collaborating on screen-printed posters, which nobody was really doing in Halifax. “We just thought we'd give it a try, and so we did it out of our house for a couple of years,” says Smith. “Our bathtub got really dirty. It was fun. We started by doing show posters for local bands and the scene was very supportive, so we got a bunch of jobs and it became a second part-time job for us.”

Slowly it turned into a full-time job, and the duo formed a graphic arts collective called Yorodeo. For a while they produced advertising designs, but then quickly realized that they didn't want to just be problem solvers for clients. “So we got a studio, and we shifted our focus more towards fine art and making prints and having gallery shows.”

Yorodeo's most recent project, a mind-tickling and literally absorbing collection of two dozen pieces called Three-Dee Realms, has been exhibited in seven provinces so far. It stemmed from Hammond having this great 1970s how-to manual for making 3D images with math and angles, and Smith having a couple of old Basil Wolverton comics that he was really into. They realized that the two-colour method shown in both would lend itself really nicely to screen printing.

“Most of the 3D screen printing I'd seen hadn't really been done that well in my opinion,” says Smith. “It would just be the same image printed over in a different colour and shifted to the side, or it seemed like some people didn't even realize how it worked, they just put it wherever. We had a pretty good idea of how it worked because we'd both played with it as kids, using colouring pencils and wearing the glasses.”

They also both liked the idea of doing a print series that was based on science fiction and strange fantasy landscapes. And although a few of the resulting pieces feature alien characters, they were especially interested in creating worlds that a blue-and-red glasses-wearing audience could get lost in, perhaps even imagining themselves going to.

They did a small run, which sold out and then was reprinted and expanded upon. “It was before Avatar, before 3D got really huge again. But people were pretty excited about it because, like, a lot of the 3D stuff that was happening, all this Pixar stuff or whatever, it was very computery. And this was a hands-on, old technology version of it. People were enthusiastic about it so we decided to make it an ongoing project and keeping it going.” 

Having toured Three-Dee Realms fairly extensively and given artist talks, Smith says they've been really happy with the levels of crowd interaction they've witnessed. To encourage more, their plan is try and add some more sculptural elements to the show, as well as 3D movie projections. 

Experimenting with that in mind, Smith's Lowlife will include a couple of 3D sequences. Naturally, his approach sounds deceptively simple, labour intensive, and ultimately pretty stunning. “It's two images, the left eye image and the right eye image, and they just flicker intermittently,” explains Smith. “You don't need to wear glasses, but it has a very shifty, strobic effect, which creates a three dimensional illusion. That was a neat way of adding some dreaminess.”

All Deformer images by Seth Smith; all Three-Dee Realms images by Seth Smith & Paul Hammond. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Deformer from Dog Day's Bandcamp page (or, better yet, get your paws on the rad screen printed LP from your local record store).

Komodo: Shadow Dance [May/2011] — TO BLEND WELL is to bend the mind. Oftentimes, the more layers and levels you can slyly mash together, the better. 

The intoxicating cocktail of lust, mysticism and deformity that graces multi-instrumentalist and DJ Komodo's new-ish record only hints at the intricate web of crazy ideas, cultural stewing and synchronicity that led to its creation. Tip of the iceberg isn't quite the right phrase to describe this cover art. Perhaps: tip of the tongue, hiding cavernous metres of digestion. 

Komodo (aka Matthew Burton) and Howie Tsui met years ago, through mutual university friends who all landed in Ottawa around Y2K or so. Burton soon ditched full-time work to concentrate on his music career in Montréal, which ebbed and flowed and flourished with his Komodo Dubs parties at SAT, and as he scoured the planet for new sounds and instruments for his DJ sets. In the fall of 2010, while collaborating with a choreographer on a contemporary dance piece for The MAI, he came across a crop of Tsui's paintings in the gallery space that knocked his socks off, not least because he had no idea his old friend was even a visual artist. 

At the time, Tsui was exhibiting his spellbinding Horror Fables scrolls (below), but there were also some pieces in the show from a slightly older body of work called Of Shunga and Monsters. To try and put it succinctly, Tsui's work fuses historical wisdom or mythology and antiquated styles with a sort of hyperactive 21st Century dream logic, all of it steeped heavily in Asian pop culture and echoes of his childhood imagination. 

Burton was smitten with everything he saw at The MAI, and went to check out a few more of Tsui's paintings that were hanging at Yves Laroche gallery, where he immediately bought a piece from the Shunga series called “Carp Feed.” He loved how the small, powerful painting blended together so many ideas and emotions. “You see this kind of horrific looking fish monster thing eating these beautiful erotic women. It's sexual and graceful and elegant and grotesque and sort of morbid all at once.” In the weeks and months after he bought it, and as he spent time with it while assembling the tracks for Shadow Dance at home, Burton realized that “to my ear, to my eye, the image felt very fitting to the music that I was working on.” 

Shadow Dance was hatched by a slowly-gestating collaboration with a choreographer named Tomomi Morimoto, which debuted at The MAI in March 2010. The piece is called Threshold, and its approach is heavily inspired and influenced by a form of Japanese contemporary dance called butoh. Burton says butoh attempts to strike a balance between opposing body languages and ideas, such as light and dark, and he notes that it “has nothing to do with anguish after the A-bomb,” in spite of what you might find online. “One of the things you'll see is a fascination with death or darkness or fear. But it can also be very beautiful. Sometimes it's very cryptic and minimal, and you kind of wonder what's going on. Other times it can be very dramatic and full of dynamic movement.”

He also says it often depends on the particular choreographer, and that Morimoto's work was very suggestive of creatures and played a lot with facial expressions. The music he was crafting for her moves was “really moody and abstract,” trying to capture some of the sexual tension and mental unravelling that he saw and felt in the choreography. (He says the track “Invisible Forces” on Shadow Dance is basically one of the core soundscapes from Threshold.) So as Burton mulled over Tsui's “Carp Feed,” he began to see parallels in the things that all three of them blending together. 

“I look at the piece, and just the positions of the hands and shapes of the feet and the arms, and the postures of the bodies, to me it looked like they're dancing, like they're involved in some sort of ritualistic performance. And it kind of really captured some of the feelings we were playing with: madness, sexuality, the grotesque. Yet the first thing that I think when I look at it is that it's beautiful, in spite of the potential horror or violence of it. It's dark, and yet it doesn't convey anger or depression. Are those people dying? We don't know. If they're making the transition into some next state of existence that involves not being alive in this body, they look like they're okay with it — there's some sort of acceptance as well.” 

On another level, Burton also liked that Tsui was playing with artistic traditions from Japan and China, making the sort of mash-ups that only people who've been exposed to Canadian-grade multiculturalism can. This gelled with what he was trying to do musically as well, especially in his DJ sets, which feature live instrumentation such as Australian didgeridoo, Turkish flute and Chinese percussion played over electronica, sampled from what he describes as world music. 

Burton started playing shows at The MAI in 2008, and a year later he began working with Morimoto on a 10-minute seed piece that would later evolve into the 50-minute Threshold show. Given the space's mandate, it's fitting that this is also where Tsui's art came into the picture. “The MAI is really interested in people who are potentially cross disciplinary, but particularly where there's more than one culture being addressed at the same time,” explains Burton of the fostering organization's globe-trawling mash up of theatre, dance, music and art exhibitions. “The idea behind it is that, in a place like Montreal, you see lots of cross currents with different cultures, and it can be the source of new, inspirational ideas.”

Of Hybrids & Horror: Interview with Howie Tsui from Sarah Tue-Fee on Vimeo.

Preparing for his first solo show in Ottawa in 2006, on the heels of getting his first grant, Tsui did a series of paintings called Of Manga and Mongrels. He calls this series, the first he'd ever done all at once, “a rejection of the cute, saccharine, candy-coated imagery I was doing” in favour of more grotesque themes. 

As he was putting Manga together — which basically involved him creating two-layer collages by drawing over top of Hokusai manga pieces — an art zine called Faesthetic asked him to contribute to an issue whose theme was 'Love & Death.' So Tsui decided he'd apply the same technique to a shunga image and “push the grotesque thing a little further” to “make really freaky-ass monsters.” Shunga refers to a form of Japanese erotic art that became immensely, illicitly popular starting in the 1600s, but Hokusai's “The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife” from two centuries later is as good a place as any to start.

Tsui really liked the result, and began producing Of Shunga and Monsters next. He says this series “became more of a mental workout because the images are way more complex. They're much more detailed and there's a lot of components, so it was much trickier.” He'd printed and cut out a big stash of old shunga, and would work by taking one or two of them, “put them together and rotate them, overlap or cut off certain areas,” basically flip them around until he could “see an eye or a mouth or something. It's very much a subconscious, looking-into-the-clouds kind of thing.”

Once he was happy with a blended composition, he'd use rubber cement to stick them face down on the bottom of a semi-opaque mylar surface, and then ink the top side. “So what happens is the collage on the backside is slightly recessed, and there's an illusion of depth. I would ink what I see, sometimes recycle lines, fill some areas in, create textures in certain areas.”

Some pieces are paired because they use the same images in different configurations. Given their improvisational nature, it's tough to pin down what exactly inspired “Carp Feed” or any of the other 17 or so Shunga pieces (most of which have actually been kept together). Tsui makes passing reference to the “Acrimboldo school” (after the Italian artist whose famous portraits are composed of painted fruit, flowers, fish and other non-facial items), maybe Brian Jungen's masks made out of sneakers, and “a Japanese artist who does these portraits with all these little people in the face.” 

Inevitably, the work mines a deeper recess of Tsui's imagination. “I have this weird, nostalgic, suspended adolescent thing, where everything I make has some sort of reverberation with warm fuzzy memories I have from being a kid,” he explains. “When I was living in Nigeria, my uncles in Hong Kong would send me all these really cool die cast Japanese transformer robots. I very much see this series inspired by that. There's something transforming into something else, with these shifting components. One thing is two things, with all these components building up to a whole.”

In retrospect, Tsui thinks he mostly just wanted to exercise his technique and experiment with variations on a motif before moving back towards making epic narrative paintings again. “Now I have much more confidence with a brush, and that's when I made my real jump away from a western, Euro-centric, heavy paint brush, physical style and went more to a lighter, Asian, painting-on-paper kind of style. It was a good detour so I could bump up my brush and line work skills, and it really pays off in the Horror Fables series that followed.”

Tsui began creating Horror Fables during a residency in Baie Saint Paul in 2008. Obviously the scrolls — made on large, thick sheets of mulberry paper, painted with Chinese pigments and long-handled brushes — represent an intensification of his attraction to the grotesque, albeit with a familiar, clever sense of mischief lurking between the lines. Astonishing landscapes ripple with deformities, demons and other unearthly beings, culled from Asian folk tales and ghost stories, the fantastical proverbs of his parents and horror movies he watched as a kid. By embellishing their ridiculousness in the form of dense, muted, gorgeous pastiches of gore and foreboding, Tsui aims to turn the idea of fear as an authoritative tool on its ear. 

He premiered the series at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa in April 2009, and they've been received incredibly well at a handful of galleries across the country. Tsui particularly enjoyed showing them at The MAI, “because I've never presented it in another space with those fancy, barn-gate theatre lights. They were able to make the space really dark and really haunting, and I haven't been able to recreate that anywhere else.” 

Not that he hasn't tried. At his Horror Fables exhibits, Tsui paints simple, flowing, abstract shapes and gestural brushstrokes on top of large sheets of rice paper taped to the walls. He then tears off the paper and stains the areas around the remaining marks and textures with sulphur from matches, leaving a “lifeless body” of paper on the floor and the “writhing souls that serve as paranormal residue” on walls, perching like blood-flecked apparitions. He also used this technique to create the cover art for a record called No Ghost, released in 2010 by The Acorn, for whom Tsui used to play guitar. 

The video above is from Tsui's summer 2011 show in Vancouver, called Celestials of Saltwater City. He also created a small army of wooden box projectors for exhibition visitors to play with and manipulate, so they could make his projected images interact on the gallery walls. Deploying this antiquated cinematic technology meant that he learned to build and debug the boxes, dealing with magnifying lenses, focal points, electrical wiring and other variables beyond his expertise. Similarly, the project he's currently producing came from a curator asking Tsui to blend his style into another form and press his technical capabilities.

Collaborating with the Museum of Health Care in Kingston, he's been commissioned to create three pieces that draw from the experiences of medical surgeons during the War of 1812. Enthralling in concept alone, one of them is a modified pinball machine, re-themed to explore the anatomical structure of the human body and the damage that battlefield medics dealt with in their day. Tsui is working with a pinball wizard/technician to replace the motherboard and ensure that all his graphical elements and triggered audio samples are operational.

Another of the pieces relies heavily on the anatomy lab at Queen's University, where casts of donated bones and organs are being made by students to construct a huge sculpture. Tsui says it will feature “tweaked anatomy,” and that it takes some of its inspiration from a four-armed, musclebound Mortal Combat character named Goro. 

“It's weird having people making stuff for you and just conceiving of it,” admits Tsui, who usually produces everything solo. “I wouldn't have really made a jump this drastic if I wasn't proposed a project with such thematic limitations, I guess. But slowly, I've been more trusting and more experimental in the way I'm moving into mediums and things I have no idea how to do, and am actually kind of shitty at.” 

At the same time, Tsui sees something of a full circle being realized, especially in the sense that he's always been trying to blend strange realms into his work. “As I'm getting help from these people, I'm kind of being let into these subcultures, these tinkerers, hobbyists. It relates a lot to when I was first started making art, and I was really influenced by Otaku culture in Japan—people that are just obsessed with anime and manga. Now I'm seeing pinheads, these other bits of subculture that I didn't know anything about. In a way, my work always kind of gravitates towards these very esoteric interest levels.”

Nick Diamonds: I Am An Attic [July/2011] — FOR MORE THAN a decade now, Nick Thorburn (aka Nick Diamonds) has displayed a huge talent for writing intricate, sometimes epic, always playful and often droll songs about death and the madness that precedes it. He's also steered his listeners through a long and winding road of music styles and sound arsenals, from the frantic and fantastical garage rock of The Unicorns to the shimmery, Hawaii-meets-R&B jams of Reefer to the polymorphous pop of Islands (and beyond). 

While making all sorts of art with instruments and other musicians he loves is clearly Thorburn's raison d'être, he's also been a compulsive drawer since childhood. He's self-taught—in fact: the only drawing class he ever took, while attending film school in Montréal, almost stymied his interest—and he's always gravitated towards using simple paper, pencils and ink. 

Simplicity seems to be part of the attraction. Thorburn decribes drawing as a “very internal, private thing that I do, mostly to relieve stress and to get away from the musical part of my—quote, unquote—creative expression. I can just sit down and get into this world of drawing for hours and I won't notice that time has gone by, and I'll be completely relaxed.” 

In contrast, Thorburn drew the minimalist art for his recent solo effort (a digital-only release), I Am An Attic, under fairly tight circumstances (albeit in typically impulsive fashion). As he describes in the brief Q&A below, the image just kind of casually fell into place when the new record suddenly became ready to put out after a long period in limbo. 

Oddly enough, the album drop is (unintentionally) something of a precursor to Thorburn's first proper attempt at publishing his visual art, under the guise of yet another creative outlet that has been gestating for while. This Is Howie Doo is one of two comic books he's developing, and he's hoping to publish it in late 2011 (or early 2012?) with some help from a friend who runs Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles. Thorburn describes the second, unfinished comic as a “collection of little connected stories” that are “pretty light humour, but kinda dark and kinda ridiculous, just inspired by R. Crumb stuff and other random shit.” Strips from that second comic will appear in an anthology being put out by Seattle's pioneering Fantagraphics Books this fall. 

What can you reveal about your still-in-the-works comic?  

The book I'm working on now is one long story. I'm just sort of having the story unfold as I go, so I don't really know where it's headed. There's kind of a cast of characters, and all of them are recognizable cartoon characters like Olive Oil, Fred Flinstone, Bart Simpson, Little Lulu. But they're all kind of different: they're ripped-off, weird mutations of those iconic cartoons. And they're just miserable because it's a kind of end of the world, apocalyptic scenario they're all in. 

I've been working on it for about a year. I'll take months off at a time from it, and then come back to it, but I started it last October when I moved to L.A. I take it with me on tour in case I have any time to get into it. I'm hoping to find somewhere to release that, but I don't like the idea of self-releasing because there's a lot of work involved, and having the boxes sit in my room would be a drag. 

What other album covers have you drawn in the past? 

I did one for this release on Alien 8 that came out years ago called Books on Tape. I did the Unicorns' album covers, and I did an Islands seven inch artwork. I'll do a lot of T-shirt designs for bands that I'm in. But I feel like my music is getting more and more serious and less comical, so it becomes less appropriate for the kind of drawings that I do. I'm sort of stymied by my style—it's a little too cartoony for album artwork, I feel like. I'd prefer it if it were a little more abstract and high concept, but the stuff I do is kinda low-brow, so it never really fits. 

How did this drawing end up as the cover art for I Am An Attic? 

I don't know. The idea to even release this thing was very impulsive and spontaneous. I had finished it over a year ago, and it had just been kind of sitting on my hard drive and I didn't really have any plans for it. Then I just decided to release it and be done with it, get rid of it. And it happened quite fast: I mixed it on a weekend with a guy who I'd worked on another record with in L.A. I put it online on a Monday, and on the Sunday I figured I should come up with some accompanying art, so I sat down and this is what I did. 

Did you have a good idea of the image you wanted before you created it? 

No, it was pretty stream of consciousness. I just sat down and it happened that way, it wasn't a direction or anything motivating it, it was just an impulsive drawing. I think it's in my sketchbook or maybe on a piece of paper that was lying around. I just drew it in pencil and then filled it in with an ink pen. But it seemed stark, and alien, and isolated, and that's kind of what the theme of the whole album was. 

What do you like about the image? 

I don't even know if I like it. I needed something, I really wanted to get the record out. It'd been sitting for a year and I'd been talking about it for two years, so when it finally got to the stage where it'd been mixed and was ready to be released, I thought, 'Fuck, the time is now. I've waited this long.' 

It just... sufficed, I guess. I know that's a terrible thing to say. It wasn't like a romantic decision to go with this art work, but I made it and it seemed to work. I don't know where it came from or what about it I liked, really. 

Life is Butter Dreamer! Aug 2 to 21/11 — IT'S ABOUT TIME someone made space for a retrospective exhibit of work from the ogre-sized, prolific psychedelic mind of celebrated musician/animator/illustrator/circuit-bending-fetishist/all-around-delightfully-mad-scientist Chad VanGaalen. Next week, the Calgary-based artist will skip the pond to play songs from his latest record, Diaper Island, to some lucky Europeans. His first performance will also kick off a three-week showing of a few hundred individual pieces of his visual art, including animation cells from one of his fantastically trippy music videos and illustrations that span the period of his four acclaimed solo records with Flemish Eye. 

VanGaalen pulled about half the material for the show from an old suitcase where he keeps drawings and retired sketchbooks. “It was definitely strange, kind of like having a conversation with your ex-girlfriend for like five days, just locked up together in a room,” he says. 

The spread on display at Andenken will feature portraits of friends, strangers, weirdos, dragons (!) and other monsters, a range of lush landscapes, delightful oddities, a bunch of half-finished comic books, and sketchbook gems from overseas album tours and road trips across Canada—including scenes from a ridiculously improvised and epic mission to Dawson City, Yukon, in a school bus, largely fueled by two mason jars full of weed. Another 100 or so pieces in the show are cells of cutout animations that VanGaalen crafted for J. Mascis' fantastic “Not Enough” video (below), which the gallery will also screen along with some of his other morph-o-riphic moving pictures. (Speaking of which: His video for "Peace On The Rise" is like a Kubrickian sci-fi cartoon.)

Ten days before having to ship his work overseas, VanGaalen also went on a week-long drawing bender to contribute some fresh material. His subject: the droves of drunken rafters who float down the Bow River through Calgary as a summertime right of passage (or maybe just an excuse to get loaded in the sun), observed from what sounds like a totally non-incognito riverbank spot. 

“I kinda set up this, like, camo zone where I could be sitting. I hollowed out the inside of a bush on the edge of the river, and pulled the leaves out of the middle section so I had a nice shaded spot. The challenging thing about it was that I only had a window of about 10 seconds to draw people as they went by. And I was totally not camouflaged. People were like, 'Dude, who is that dude in the bush totally perving out on people?' It looked pretty suspicious.”

Accidental creepiness aside (in the eyes of apparent dick-wagglers, mind you), VanGaalen was pretty stoked about the results. “Being forced to draw them fast made them cartoony, kinda like Gary Larson-style almost... just one-liners. And there's weird shit going on with rafter culture in this city, I feel like. I kinda got to know the rafts. There's a Ralph Lauren inflatable raft that everyone has now. I don't know where the fuck they're getting them. It's like a giant donut. Everyone has an inflated recliner armchair with a cup holder built in, and it seats 11 or 12 people all facing themselves in a giant ring. And just drawing an object that weird as quickly as I can is crazy enough. But then the people are shirtless biker dudes with handlebar moustaches, next to bikini babes, next to a bald headbanger or something.” 

If you're lucky enough to find yourself in Amsterdam in August 2011, Life is Butter Dreamer! is a rare and special opportunity to soak up a literal tickle trunk of crazy, uncanny, joyful and no-doubt hilarious visuals by one of Canada's most incredible young artists. Especially in a city where you can—for the moment, at least—buy psychedelics and smokeables with your coffee.

Pat Jordache: Future Songs [Apr/2011] — DIVING IN HEADLONG and figuring out your moves in mid-air seems like a key ingredient in Pat Gregoire's creative repertoire. So it's fitting that the cover art for the re-release of his full-length debut as Pat Jordache (yes, after the jeans) pays accidental homage to the improvisational zeal and collaborative tenacity that went into making it.

After losing the original Future Songs sessions when his laptop was stolen (on the same day he failed a driving test), Gregorie managed to rescue his homemade record (thanks, Mediafire!) and eventually turn it into a cassette tape release, which in turn convinced Constellation to remaster and reissue it. Likewise, the capturing and recurring re-creation of a photograph of Sarah Pupo's art for the LP/CD cover image became an unintentionally epic undertaking. 

Pupo's assembled flock of abstract blobs also fits nicely with the freewheeling, kaleidoscopic, semi-slo-mo uproar that sounds like Pat Jordache. Pupo describes the image as having "these sort of humanoid figures that keep creeping into my work” via a process that allows her to operate very intuitively. “That's when it turns out best, and it's always kind of a combination of chance and control,” she says. “I like putting ink down on paper and having it sort of be like a lab, just adding and taking away and blotting stuff and seeing how everything reacts, and then kind of going in there and nudging it in a different direction once I see things happening.” 

Gregoire craves a similar approach: “Maybe it's just something that all artists do, but I like the idea of a creative act being a thought process unto itself, of it always being an experiment. Maybe we're just messy people who don't premeditate a whole lot and just do as we go.” 

It's definitely appropriate that Gregroire and Pupo's creative sensibilities overlapped into an emblem for Future Songs. The two artists became roommates by chance when they skipped Toronto for Montréal around the same time in 2003, and they've lived together most of the time since, developing their respective talents—Gregoire most recently with Islands and Sister Suvi. They also crack jokes about recently bumping their marriage pact from age 50 to 60, given that they're both now pushing 30.

They'd collaborated in the past on some poster projects, "and the occasional house cleaning,” quips Gregoire. Pupo also did the cover for the Future Songs cassette (above), which “had a very homemade operation and feel to it, with Sarah's drawing photocopied on butcher paper—it cost about five cents a sheet and looked really sweet.” When Constellation asked for new art for the re-release, Gregoire quickly honed in on the strange humanoids that Pupo was making at the time. 

“Sarah obliged and drew a bunch of them,” he says. “They started out and finished as these cutouts, with each one separate and thus arrangeable into different configurations. This seemed like a lot of creative potential at first, but it also led to infinite possibility...” 

Pupo: “...and massive indecision.” 

Gregoire: “Yeah, a whole lot of not shitting and not getting off the pot.” 

“What happened was that it's such a testy process to make these figures that some of them don't turn out,” says Pupo. “I was never happy with a full sheet of them, with one drawing, so I would just cut out my favourites and I would have this whole assortment. We decided that it would be a good idea to shoot them in different amalgamations and have them as sort of moving figures.” 

“So Sarah did a bunch of configurations at her studio and brought them home,” explains Gregoire. After much deliberation about the best compositions, their seemingly finished idea began to unravel a little when they were told that the resolution of their photographs wasn't good enough. “And so began this odyssey of trying to recreate the correct placement, lighting, warmth of the shot, all that.” 

Three photographers and five makeshift studio sessions later, they finally revived the version they were after—appropriately, a bigger, cleaner cut of the first low-fi attempt. The final shoot, pulled off by Pat Jordache band mate and impromptu tour documentarian Phillip Chanel, was also a bit of a gong show: “We ended up building a crazy contraption with furniture piled up into this ridiculous looking structure, and then a tripod was rigged to shoot down from directly above the cutouts,” says Gregoire. Their seven-foot-tall makeshift rig used a desk, a table retrieved from the garbage, and emptied-out record boxes, with ample weight up top to steady the off-kilter tripod. 

Admittedly, Gregoire likes to wing it in good company. “I tend to have this really community-based approach, for better or for worse, of not even trying to but always ending up working with friends because of some sort of inherent cheapness or lack of professionalism, just keeping it in the family. Which is great, and it's awesome to work with your friends, but it means that you're always figuring it out as you go, at least a little bit. You've got a lot of heart, but maybe it takes you a few tries to get that right picture res.”  

That said, both artists prefer to produce by the seat of their pants. “There's usually not a plan,” says Pupo, “and often that bites me in the ass, but the work wouldn't be the same otherwise.” 

“I think there's just a look to what you make when you're working with your friends and it's a community effort, versus needing to take a picture and paying someone you don't know to do it,” says Gregoire. “It's weird, when you farm things out and get the pro approach, rarely do you love the results, but because you paid for them, you're committed to them. It's never the same, and I feel like that's sort of been a theme of the entire record: Doing it not necessarily the quickest, or the most efficient way, but the familiar one.” 

In their case, Gregoire and Pupo worked with Ian Ilavsky at Constellation to evolve their 10 or so configuration ideas into coherent record art packaging. They had images of the humanoids cropped variously, some obscured into colour patterns, sometimes stacked on top of each other, “ones that acknowledged more that they were figurative, others that were more abstracted,” explains Pupo. And as for what elevated their cover choice: “I think there's something about the gathered shapes that evokes some kind of mystery taking place. That huddle... What are they doing together? There's something a little bit creepy and magical about it.” 

“There's probably a little bit of after-the-fact projection happening in my saying so,” says Gregoire,” but I like that it does evoke that community mentality a little.” 

Pupo deadpans another joke: “Yeah, I'm the green one.”

But seriously: Pupo explains her art at the time (2010, that is) as moving away from the figurative and verging on abstraction. “Although for me it always maintains this sort of figurative or narrative bottom line, but it's not always recognizable to other people. I was thinking a lot in my work about memory, and ghosts, and residues of actions and events, the things that are left in place after everyone's gone. The traces of life. Like if something bad has happened in a place, how do you walk in and feel that? How would you depict such a thing? That's kind of what my practice was circling around. So that required me to experiment with these shapes, with bodies that were more like presences.” 

Pupo says she wasn't really thinking of a specific event or situation while crafting ideas for the Future Songs cover, but she did amp up her normally sparing use of colour for Gregoire's benefit. “I think it goes well with the music, or at least with kind of what I can hear in his music: A sort of apocalyptic psychedelia,” she says.   

Her technique is pretty simple. “I work on paper a lot, not on canvas, and I use a lot of deep black or dark ink and contrast that with more vivid colours and more washiness. I lay down water on the paper, and because it has a membrane it stays in the basic shape that you lay it down in. With good watercolour paper it just sits on the surface, and it just catches all the ink, so I drop in different colours and amounts into the water and they react to each other. Or you can break open the membrane with a paintbrush and it'll spill out and do weird things.”

The results, however, are ripe with possibility, and so Pupo has continued working a lot with this particular material technique, albeit in tandem with other experiments. “I've been trying to make a couple of small drawings as a ritual daily practice, still dealing with the same kind of themes, but with a sort of more journalistic or diaristic approach,” she says. “Just processing the events of my day, but not overthinking them. I like the idea of thinking through a drawing—not thinking too much about it beforehand, but having the actual making of the work be the thought process.” 

Jennifer Castle: Castlemusic [Apr/2011] — OFTEN IT'S BEST not to overanalyse things. So goes the prevailing wisdom of bewitching singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle, whose third solo record owes much of its creation to this approach. 

Patiently put together between early summer and late fall of 2010, Castle says that while she definitely crafted Castlemusic with specific intentions, “we didn't ask too many things of the songs, we just let them exist.” Recording sporadically with partner David Clarke and producer Jeff McMurrich in Toronto, Castle admits that the trio did a lot of experimentation that eventually led them back to their bed tracks. “I never exactly know what it is that I'm trying to do, so there's a blindfoldedness about the whole thing. For me, that's when I'm creative is when I'm exercising some sense of discovery or improvisation.”

To choose an album cover for her new discoveries, Castle gave in to serendipity. The previous summer, she'd played a gig in Brooklyn at an event called Whitney's Biennial, which was put together by her artist friend Davida Nemeroff, who'd photographed the cover of her last album, You Can't Take Anyone. Castle performed from an improvised stage, above which hung a diamond-shaped, multicoloured abstract painting that was chained to the ceiling, “probably as large as a person with their arms stretched out.” She recalls the setup feeling slightly dangerous, and that it was “a bit of a fish out of water for a painting to be floating in the air like that.” Nonetheless, Castle immediately liked the piece's psychedelic qualities, and felt it fit nicely with her music. She also hit it off with the painter, Brooklyn-based Mira Dancy. 

A year or so later, Dancy's work was suddenly, strangely hovering just above Castle's radar again. While in hot pursuit of a cover image for Castlemusic, both Clarke and another artist friend called her attention to Dancy's website. “I went online and saw the painting Drawback, and I thought it was perfect,” says Castle. “It didn't have to have a sense of meaning that I could articulate, it just had to fit. I like letting it exist as this beautiful thing that I feel complements the overall design of the record and the record itself. It's mysterious.”

One thing's for sure: Castlemusic and Dancy's Drawback both explore a sense of colourful mystery. But Castle is also talking about the album's backside art, a photo that Clarke took which had already been decided upon (pictured, below). The photocopied quality and “really crass black and white” are quite intentional; Castle liked the eeriness, and that her eyes were the image's most reflective element. This feature also explains what made Drawback such a natural spontaneous choice.   

“In Mira's painting, you dance all around it, your eye keeps going throughout the whole canvas, but the eyes are so striking,” says Castle. “It was just this perfect complement to this photo really rooted in reality, and then you flip it and the cover is this completely surreal, expressionist, beautiful other world. I liked the complement because I think where they are in relationship is their eyes.”

Incidentally, there's an emerging thread in Dancy's creative process that also mirrors Castle's go-with-the-flow reflex. After Whiney's Biennial, Dancy started “thinking about how I can incorporate more performative elements into my actual practice in the studio.” Using different paint was one way to experiment: “The ink in Drawback is really watery acrylic, so it's sort of this spontaneous event that happens, and it either works or it doesn't.” 

She's also began playing around with canvas materials and shapes. For example, her pillow pieces evolved out of practical utility (“It's expensive to ship work around”), but also because “they have an interactive or performative element themselves.”

Dancy also says her work was very abstract for a while, but that she's returned to creating bodies and voices while still working very impulsively. “I don't have an idea before I do it. With Drawback I was thinking of a body and shape, and creating it as it occurred to me, responding to that particular shape. My paintings can be pretty mysterious or surprising when they arrive.”

When they do, Dancy can see confrontation and drama (or melodrama) as recurring themes, as though her characters have witnessed something and captured it. At the same time, she strives to keep a rawness that steers her work clear of perfection or conventional beauty. This also informs her penchant for producing unusual ideas, such as the piece that was chained to the ceiling when she first met Castle (not pictured; the piece below is called Queen of Sheeba). 

“It can be such a let down to put up your work up in a clean white space which feels like it's sort of sucking the energy out,” says Dancy, adding that she's more fulfilled when there's something else going on in an exhibit space. “As my paintings have become more spontaneous in terms of the ink and staining with acrylics, while I'm making them I'm dancing or moving around a lot, and so it's more satisfying to think of them going out into the world in a way that's similar to how they're being made. It's more interesting to think of paintings as something that can be activated, or that can activate their surroundings.”

Ultimately, Dancy wants her work to have a physical effect on its audience, to inspire the feeling of something or someone else that strikes you in your reality. “Jennifer's songs have that too. Parts of them, and her voice in particular, it just hits you. You don't know what it is immediately, because it sort of seeps in.” 

Sounds like a dead ringer for the way Castlemusic's cover art was picked. Oddly enough, the root of their kinship likely has more to do with depth than instinct, as Dancy also recognizes: “I was really drawn to Jennifer's music and songs because they are like poems. It takes a long time to unravel her narratives. I think I definitely have a similar relationship to that kind of language, and I see it alongside these figures and bodies in my work.”

Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (Feb/2011) — TRYING TO DESCRIBE the music on Colin Stetson's new record with words is like trying to decorate a cake with dirt. It can be done, but this is definitely an album that should introduce itself. 

You also need to actually see the American-born, Montréal-based saxophonist perform before your mind will completely blow (or at least watch this), but here's the detonator: the songs on New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges are essentially just Stetson, his alto, tenor or bass sax, a small army of mics, a shamanic talent for breath cycling and a fierce imagination. The recordings are single takes, no overdubs, just deluges of hypnotic percussion and melody and raw emotion culled from all over his body and instrument, rippling into form as he rocks back and forth between feet, bullfrogging his cheeks.

The vision that appeared between Stetson's ears as he began exploring this new musical terrain also inspired the album's cover image. You may have already caught wind of him describing a melee of blind, warmongering wild horses on a forgotten beach. (For the record, Stetson says he's “kinda kicking myself in the dick a little bit about saying the words graphic novel out loud, because now that's out there and people know that I've been thinking about that and writing it, and now I actually have to produce.” In other words: sit tight and just enjoy his songs for now.) 

The imaginary scene he describes — a herd of isolated, eyeless horses strapped with cannons that fire whenever they run, igniting panic as they all try to escape their own terrifying noises and eventually fall into the sea — is the seed that spawned Judges (first the song, then the record). Stetson calls it an “underlying narrative,” “like a guide,” “just a tool,” and “a companion piece.” He insists the scene (and others like it) are “metaphors for the more general arc and themes that the record deals with,” and shouldn't be construed as meanings of songs, which is “really antithetical to the initial point of making music, and making a record like this in particular.” 

Instead, think of the crazy ass horse vision as an emotional temperature gauge. “The scenes started to become something that would accompany a song, and then I could bounce thematic ideas off of that narrative towards seeing how the scene would feel, if it would have a definite resolution, or if it would be something that would kind of drift,” explains Stetson. “A lot of the stuff I do, I tend to think it out in my head really visually, and that informs me on how to take it musically — if questions need to be answered, or if this is just a space to inhabit for a while.”

The depth of what Stetson actually envisions is fascinating. His fantasy is intricate: a gaunt, metallic-hued, mechanical-looking breed of Mongolian horse; their eyelessness borrowed from a Chinese folk tale about a boy whose paper horse is brought to life; their cannons modelled after the Bira, a Nepalese relative of the Gatling gun. The broader “arc and themes” Stetson mentions are fear and transcendence and isolation, and tackling them is what he calls “kinda my attempt at dealing with the greater human condition. I feel like if there's anything that's universal it's our ultimate isolation from everyone and everything, in that we are just us, ourselves. I was also trying to get into disparate concepts of isolation in the evolution of ideas, in how they could create completely different and opposing results given time in that isolation. Fundamentally what I'm doing is channelling everything that I know through this one very specific medium, and in doing that trying to create as big and as broad a brushstroke as I can.” 

Aware that the breadth of detail in his mind might be a bit daunting, Stetson only spilled some of it when he began speaking with Tracy Maurice about creating the cover and packaging art. He played her some songs, told her a bit about how they were making the record — sound data collected on 20 microphones, including contact mics on his saxes — and says he was “somewhat vague” about the horses. Originally he'd been thinking of something very literal, perhaps photorealistic, “almost like a movie poster.” 

Maurice, whose work you've seen on the cover of Arcade Fire's first two albums (and the first record by Bell Orchestre, one of Stetson's many collaborators), had never heard anything like Judges. At first she simply wanted to find a way of complimenting his experimental approach, and the iconic imagery that she says his music conjured: “Horses of the apocalypse, the drumming of hooves, dust and metal, weightlessness and floating, light and shadow.” 

She felt their visions meshed pretty effortlessly, although the process of settling on an approach took a few months. Whereas previous covers Maurice worked on had often been illustrated, “the complexity of Colin's record inspired me to want to make something that had more visual depth, that felt more 3D. The record is really dynamic — refined yet jarring, bright yet brooding. I wanted to use something that could capture these contradictory elements.”

Initially she'd tried to create a charging scene with a bunch of Civil War-era miniature horses. “I painted them all black and wanted to build a set around them, but then a friend of mine sent me a link to a horse sculpture on Jordan Askill's website and it was basically the same idea but in black.” 

So she started thinking more abstractly about what Stetson had created, and soon became bent on the idea of using glass to capture light. As a material and methodology choice (as opposed to drawing or physically building an image) it certainly evoked the recording process, where sounds were gathered and later reassembled in the mix. The concept came together when Maurice found and “ordered figures of horses from a company in China that had really strange designs that were 3D laser etched into glass blocks. I then photographed each one with a different coloured LED light underneath and then composited them all in Photoshop.” 

Maurice liked the approach because it allowed her “to play with the darker feeling imagery in a way that was still vibrant and beautiful.” Likewise, the background of the layout she created is made of black sand that she lit and photographed, “so the beach element is there too, though it's not a literal interpretation either.” 

Stetson was impressed that his ideas had been translated into something that was non-literal, and he says the cover image “takes this kind of celestial turn that I'm really pleased with.” He was also really stoked about Maurice's addition of the skulls and skeletons that appear in the packaging. “They so perfectly balanced this whole notion of fear and transcendence, because ultimately what we're dealing with is death. Whenever we're talking about the human condition, and about isolation, we're coming back to that. And the next record, which I'm working on right now, is focussed on that as well.” (!!!)

Given his process — itself a strange exploration of isolation and transcendence, and perhaps sometimes fear as well — I couldn't possibly imagine what Stetson must be thinking of next. And that's just as it should be.

Young Galaxy: Shapeshifting [Feb/2011] — THE WORKING CONCEPT for this Montréal foursome's third record was to completely reinvent their process, to become a different band than they were before. A changed lineup and the choice to bring Shapeshifting to life via Skype with a Swedish producer whose music they loved from across an ocean, Studio's Dan Lissvik, was certainly a leap of faith in that direction, as was the overhauled Young Galaxy sound that emerged. 

The cover art also plunges into the themes of metamorphosis and polarity. “What struck me about the image is that it evokes something assuring and unsettling at the same time. And the longer you look at it, the more that unsettling part creeps in,” says singer/guitarist Stephen Ramsay. “It has this expansive stillness to it. Something very elegant, graceful, and lovely and strange, and yet it also kind of looks wrong, like she's contorted, almost grotesque. Like she's breaking her neck on the sea floor. My mother was sort of disturbed by it.” 

Given that the band “kind of wanted to disorient people a bit,” Ramsay knew that he'd found the album cover image he wanted the moment he saw it on an art blog, killing time during recording sessions in Montréal. (Probably on Phantasmaphile, but possibly Cabinet of Curiosities.)

Ramsay reached out right away to the artist who created it, Maura Biava, an Italian based in Amsterdam (but working on something new in Rome at the time). It took a bit of fretting before an email thread began, but Biava was on board pretty quickly once it did. 

“People always moan about how the Internet has destroyed the ability of bands to make a living,” says Ramsay. “But at the same time it's opened the creative world a bit, where if you see something you like or that sparks your interest, it's as easy as tracking the person who made it down and saying, 'Hey, we really like this. Can we work with you?'”

As you can see, Biava's image is actually part of a sequence, and just one scene in a larger series whose themes are oddly serendipitous to the Shapeshifting narrative. In all of her work, Biava's approach is to develop her own take on mythological characters by immersing herself in their roles and installing props and settings that accentuate each character's lore. In the case of “Doride, falling metamorphosis,” her goddess-esque figure's demise and reinvention are cast against a blank oceanic abyss, an eerie yet alluring space that falls somewhere between drowning and rebirth. 

“I wanted to make an image where there was this fall, and then the re-elaboration of the fall,” says Biava (via Skype). “In art history, falling has been represented for centuries. But usually we miss what's happening after the fall. And especially in our society, we need to fall a lot, maybe more than in the past, because things move so much faster and we have so much going on in our lives.” 

Biava worked on the underwater Doride series for about a decade altogether, using some amazing techniques to produce her visions for the character. She arranged shoots during her semi-leisure time in Mexico, Egypt and Italy, spending up to about 20 days each year on the project, working with a small crew using scuba gear and snapping a full roll of film on every dive she could. Biava would choose her locations and her natural light conditions, set up her shots and props, and “then I would undress and dress, underwater. In the beginning that was kind of difficult, but once you're trained you can do it. You have to watch your things don't float away, so you need good assistants too. And for every picture you need to learn how to work with those conditions, because there might be currents or other things to deal with. It's complicated, but I'm very stubborn.” 

Between takes, a hired diver would bring an air tank in to Biava, careful not to stir up sand or disturb the scene. Overall execution had to be fast, before the light could change and because you can't dive for more than an hour at once. “I was doing this with a friend of mine [Dutch photographer Elspeth Diederix], and we were convinced that it would never work,” says Biava of the falling metamorphosis sequence, shot at about 8 or 9 metres deep at a dive spot called Middle Garden in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. “It took some trial and error, because sometimes I would be falling too much towards the camera or something. And it took many days of working on it and experimenting before it came together. This is how art is: you can have an idea or a concept, but it has to take on its own life before it can really work.” 

Biava also uses Doride to explore notions of communication, such as the idea that a shape can actually hold a sentence (“Doride, speaking heart,” below). More broadly, the stable of characters she's unearthed since the mid-90s started as a sort of retort to the mentality that Silvio Berlusconi's media empire espoused towards women. Biava felt compelled to look at female identities in imaginary, philosophical, emotional and psychological realms, rather than “this idea that a woman should only be concerned with material things — be it a ring, or a new car, or a washing machine, or getting her tits redone. It's ridiculous.” 

To start reeling this article in: Consider that Stephen Ramsay knew only a fraction of this back story when his mind became magnetized to using Doride's nosedive for the cover of Shapeshifting. But again, making decisions gut-first was the whole idea behind crafting this particular record. 

“It's like trying to pick up on a frequency that hits you,” explains Ramsay. “Like when you're travelling somewhere, and you're just more aware of your surroundings, and you're able to pick up on certain subtleties, and you end up putting yourself in situations that you would never put yourself into at home. I think it's good to try to keep that kind of a perspective when you're trying to do something creative, so that you're a little more alert, a little more aware.”

The Shapeshifting experiment definitely honed the band's sense of adventure. “I now feel excited to hunt people down all over the world if I need to,” says Ramsay. “There's something to be said for bringing in different perspectives, for representing what you do by coming from somewhere totally different. We just had the willingness or the lack of shame or whatever to reach out to people and say, 'Would you be interested in this?' I think somehow it feels really relevant, it makes the process seem very worthwhile, and it's incredible to be able to have people that you've never met somewhere across the world say, 'Yeah, I'm into this.'”

Especially when you're a band with big ideas, but not necessarily enough cash to live beyond the means of a musician-friendly city such as Montréal. Plus, slightly impulsive collaborations seem like a path to validation that Young Galaxy has thrived on so far. Their second record, 2009's Invisible Republic, featured a cover photo by a Norwegian photographer named Pål Hermansen, whom Ramsay had also tracked down online (after seeing the shot in a World Press Photo exhibit a few years earlier).

Destroyer: Kaputt [Jan/2011] — THROUGH THE COURSE of eight previous studio full-lengths, Destroyer has stitched together an enigmatic and endlessly compelling trip around the big, bad, hyperactive mind (and hair) of Dan Bejar. The Vancouver band's ninth record delves deeper, tugged into new dimensions by a tickle trunk full of smooth jazz sounds and layers of dreamy cadence, but rooted as always in Bejar's converging — and sometimes unhinged — trains of thought. 

Whether or not Kaputt borrows from Leonard Cohen's bag of tricks, this black-and-white cover image, taken by the six-piece band's keyboardist, certainly evokes the famous poet's unfettered detachment and sly humour. In the email Q&A below, Ted Bois explains the roots of Bejar's poseur tourist character, as well as the who/what/when/where/how/why for his photo. 

Bois is a self-trained photographer. He says he shoots exclusively in available light, often at night or in dark places, and also that he is drawn to a broad range of styles — from the surrealism of Jean Cocteau films, Clarence John Laughlin and Man Ray, to the garishness of 1970s stock photography and Helmut Newton, to name a few of many influences.

“In practice, I gravitate towards false-seeming environmental portraits, wherein the subject and his environment have a sort of unnatural or uneasy relationship with each other — a sort of generalized, banal sense of mild discomfort,” says Bois. “Bejar exudes this mild discomfort naturally, which makes him a lot of fun to photograph.” 

When was this photo taken? What kind of day was it? 

I shot this photo circa 9 p.m. on a cloudless summer evening in early July. It might be hard to tell from a black and white photo, but the sky and mountains were turning pink and blue respectively, as they often do at dusk in Vancouver. And it was a hot day, which accounts for the hazy quality of the background. Haze photographs well.

What kind of equipment did you use to take the photo?

An old Leica M4 with an even older Summicron 50mm/f2 — the "rigid" version, for you Leica nerds. Film was Kodak T-MAX P3200, because I knew I would be shooting in fading light and didn't want to use a tripod, but also because I wanted the photograph to look pre-digital. And nothing says pre-digital like grainy, high-contrast black and white film.

Where exactly was this photo taken? 

Queen Elizabeth Park, in Vancouver. Great view — it's the highest point in the city. Several photogenic landmarks: an amazing geodesic dome from the late 60s, a huge water fountain — which incidentally appears on the cover of the Archer on the Beach EP [pictured, below]. And nicely maintained sloping grounds with a distinctive English garden flavour. Basically, you could take 36 shots blindfolded there and wind up with 20 good ones, so I go there fairly often. Oh, and it's about five minutes from my apartment, which doesn't hurt either. 

What do you like about the view from that spot?

There's usually enough foliage in the foreground to block out most of downtown Vancouver, which is why tourists often have to stand on the wall for a better view of the city. I especially like this perspective because it encapsulates the proper order of things: there's the mountains, and then there's everything else.

How did you arrive at the idea of taking a cover photo at this location?

The intent was to make Dan look like a bored tourist. The Queen E., given that it's a fairly popular tourist spot, felt like a natural place for a bored tourist to be hanging out.

Is this a somewhat random photo choice, or a calculated one?

The shot itself was a candid, but part of a longer shoot with an overarching theme, if that makes any sense. I shot a few exposures of Dan sitting on that wall by himself from various angles. Then I decided to do a few incorporating some of the sightseers that were milling about, which is when this colour-coordinated family of Japanese tourists just magically entered the frame and chose to stand in precisely the right spot. Or close enough, anyway.

Why does this scene fit the music on Kaputt?

It was intended as part of a suite of photos, along with Archer and the Bay of Pigs EP [pictured, below — taken inside an old Vancouver mansion called Hycroft House], depicting Dan as a sort of disillusioned, alienated, existentially bored loner millionaire — which is the character I imagined singing the bulk of the songs on the album. I initially had some reservations about using this photo because it didn't connote the same degree of affluence as the other two, and Kaputt is easily the most affluent-sounding release of the bunch.

But in the end, I think the implied mood of the photo matches that of the record pretty well. The crux is that he has his back turned to a spectacular view because appreciating scenery is a pleasure too simple for him to grasp. He's a blase, unimpressible outsider who is, at least in his own eyes, too clever for the world and yet simultaneously feels defeated by it. I also liked the idea of casting Dan as a tourist in his own home town as a sort of inside joke. Incidentally, this may or may not be an accurate depiction of his actual relationship with Vancouver.

Regarding the Bay of Pigs cover, Ted also writes: I really wanted to ape a still from the video for Boys and Girls by Bryan Ferry — wherein Ferry seductively climbs a very fancy looking staircase with people making out next to him — but had to settle for a mood a little closer to The Shining. 'Cause it turns out, Dan doesn't really do 'sexy' ;)

Braids: Native Speaker [Jan/2011] -- MY FIRST IMPRESSION: Pillowy, psychedelic vinyl seat covers, freshly refurbished for a cosmic party bus. Or maybe an underwater still life, printed on bubble wrap.

What's actually happening in this vivid cover art by Montréal's Marc Rimmer is deceptively simple, and much less cheesy. It's a photograph composed of two unlikely props: A digital image of a mountain landscape on Rimmer's desktop, and a 4-foot by 2.5-foot (or so) plastic light panel from Home Depot that he held in front of his camera lens.

The concept came to light simply as well, albeit via a pile of trial-and-error. Rimmer had taken some outdoor photos of the Montréal foursome atop Parc du Mont-Royal while brainstorming album art ideas for their first full-length release. After those experiments, he wanted to keep the textures of the leaves and branches and trees, but he also wanted to distort them further, to blend additional layers into those textures — a nod to the band's approach to making music. The notion of using a florescent light panel to nail that effect came to Rimmer one day in French class, presumably with his eyes procrastinating on the ceiling.

“To me, it says Braids,” says Rimmer, who listened heavily to Native Speaker for a month or so while designing the album packaging. “It's very rare that I'm pumped in this way about something this long after I've done it. The artwork has been done for almost a year, but when I look at it now, it stills says that album. I just like the texture of it, and it's really colourful and it's really abstract, but also really minimal and clean. You don't really look at it and get too much out of it.”

The band wanted their inaugural record cover to convey a sort of indiscernible fluidity, and also to fuse a broad palate of moods.

“We wanted to create something that blended together a full spectrum of emotion,” explains Katie Lee, who plays keys and sings for Braids. “Our album doesn't have one specific tone. It explores different feelings, but it's all intertwined, it's not jagged or separate.”

The woven, unleashed colours that adorn Native Speaker represent that blend. Lee also points out a sort of harshness created by the light refracted through a plastic panel.“It's metallicky, not entirely smooth,” she says. “I think that works too because it's not just a smooth album. There are moments where it's a little bit rough around the edges. At the same time, behind that roughness is something very beautiful.”

Accentuating this effect, Rimmer was also intent on keeping the very fluid, matte-finish artwork separate from the black and white monochromatic box with album details, printed with a UV spot varnish to make it really shiny and wet. “I didn't want to confuse or dilute the idea, or make it busy,” says Rimmer, adding that he originally had hoped to put a sticker over the solid chunk of texture rather than add copy to the layout.

The musicians who make up Braids share Calgary roots with Rimmer, and they're all fans of his past musical contributions to Azeda Booth. They asked him to invoke this debut crop of songs with an image for two reasons: 1] they trust and respect his imagination, and b] for the sake of band unity and fresh ideas. Lee says that if one of the four band members had come up with something, everyone would have been more critical than they would be with another artist's interpretation.

“It's hard to see your music visually, because it's so personal for each person,” explains Lee. “What I see when I listen to our music isn't necessarily what Taylor [guitar, bass & vocals], or Raphie [lead vocals & guitar], or Austin [drums & vocals], or anyone else would see. I like to think that the visual side of things should be a collaboration with people who are well versed in that area — more so than my vision, or even our vision.”

Like a Braids performance, Rimmer's complement to the band's sound is lush and full of subtle surprises. “The band is all about flow and colour, there are lots of layers and things going on. And to me, this artwork is very tangible. A lot of people ask: What is it printed on? Well, it's not printed on anything special other than paper, but it's just very... juicy. Like you can touch it.”